These are questions that are being raised in the wake of last week’s mass shooting of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, which has plunged much of the country into an abyss of sorrow, rage and despair. What does the destruction of a human being, of a human body - frail and vulnerable (all human bodies are frail and vulnerable) - look like? What can we know of another’s suffering? Is such knowledge forbidden - or, alternately, necessary? And if we obtain it, what then?
Photographic images can bring us close to the experience of suffering - and, in particular, to the physical torment that violence creates - in ways that words do not. While some charge that viewing such pictures is voyeuristic, these images made me face the terror, the blood and the sheer cruelty of this practice - one that, astonishingly, has not yet been tossed into the dustbin of history.
HARD AND HANDSOME GAY MEN PICTURES SERIES
But I never understood just what it entails - the slow, cruel process by which a defenseless human being is degraded and destroyed - until I saw a series of photographs taken by Somali photojournalist Farah Abdi Warsameh, which depict the stoning execution of a man accused of adultery by the insurgent group Hizbul Islam.
I know that stoning people to death is barbaric.