Image that hits the world. How photos can tilt public opinion

“That’s Real Starvation Stuff“, The American president Donald Trump concluded when he saw photos of starving children in Gaza. One of the photos was that of the eighteen-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub held by his mother. At the end of July the photographer Ahmed Jihad did not take the photo, but in Gaza phadini, but in Gaza phadini in Gazap Public opinion about the starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza, which is wearing a garbage bag as a diaper, his backbone is horrible to see and the photo appeals to the image of the Piëta: the universal suffering of her (in this case) the Piethta on Armen.agree‘When – as it is called cliché, – words fall short, and is more often an iconic image in wars.

However, a discussion about the photo started soon. The freelance journalist David Collier, who lives in Israel, placed a blog in which he said it was a sick child, which could not symbolize hunger in Gaza. According to him, Media had been tensioned for the cart of Hamas. Right -wing opinion makers in particular took over this idea, with which they also deny the starvation in Gaza. The German magazine Bild went along with the in -speed tidal hunting from Israel ‘Hasbara‘, that images from Gaza would be unreliable. Last Tuesday the editors came up with another piece about the Palestinian photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha, who would make hunger.

In The Guardian It was said about the photo of Muhammad that the starving boy – who now only weighed six kilos where a few months earlier was nine kilos – had a disease, it was now also clear that his illness did not explain his underweight. The photo confirmed what everyone actually knows: the most vulnerable is affected the loudest, and children run the most risk: “A sick child being starved does not deserve less attention than any other child,” said The Guardianthat also emphasized that the photo gave no other picture than the numerous other photos of starving children.

The photo that won the World Press Photo in 2025 had recalled less public indignation. The Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf photographed a nine-year-old boy who had survived the bombing of Gaza city, and had lost both arms. The photo symbolizes the overall, no -nobody’s destruction of Gaza.

Tragedy in one image

Where until the nineteenth century it was mainly words that had to tilt public opinion – think of Émile Zolas J’accuse In the Dreyfus affair, The cabin of uncle Tom or Max Havelaar – In the last century, photography is increasingly taking up that role. In 1962 the German photographer Helmut Gernsheim photography described as the only language that was understood everywhere and that connected humanity, so that we would be able to share hope and despair with each other in a truthful way. “We become eyewitnesses of humanity and inhumanity,” he wrote Creative Photography.

He was partly right. Thanks to mobile phones and social media, everyone can now make the other person at lightning speed of ‘humanity and inhumanity’. This changes the role and appearance of the professional photographer. Due to the ‘democratization’ of photography, images are increasingly and more often questioned, puts into a bad light, or a photo is feeding for conspiracy theories.

Another important difference with the last century is that social media makes it increasingly difficult to catch a story or war in one image, and that photos are now more often little more than an illustration with a story or an opinion. Where the photo initially replaced the words, the photo is now used more often as a confirmation of the news or the story.

Nevertheless, the democratization of photography also offers the best opportunity to highlight multiple sides of a story and to highlight underexposed stories. Because that photos can tilt a public opinion was clear early.

The tragedy of a war

To achieve that with a photo, a process of decades has been. In 1855, for example, Roger Fenton took a photo in the Crimean War of three soldiers who stare in the void at two guns. The tragedy, the violence and the destruction of the war were missing – the photo also had little influence (and of course was also spread less broadly). Fenton’s images missed the drama needed to touch people with a photo.

That happened in the war photography from the First World War more and more, although photos were still used as a source of information, and not yet really as a symbol to show the madness, injustice or inhumanity, let alone calling for humanity.

That happened in the photos of Dorothea Lange, who recorded the great depression in America Migrant Mother (1936), a photo of the 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson. The mother with her children represented the drought of the Dust Bowl. Lange took several photos of Thompson, but it was the photo that referred to the Pieta that had the most effect. The expectation was that the photo would indent financially – and that happened too. The help would no longer reach Thompson and her children, they had already pulled further.

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What long understood was the power of zooming in on the individual. The ‘Napalm girl’, nine-year-old Kim Phúc who ran on the street in 1972 after a napalmet attack on her village, grew into the photo of the Vietnam War, and especially its madness. There was also a discussion about this photo: fifty years later, the question was who had actually taken the photo.

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The child who is a victim of a possessed world: not only Muhammad, Kim Phúc or the children of Thompson were a model of this, the photo of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi drowned in 2015 also brought the inhuman situation of the war refugees in one fell swoop. The British newspaper The Independent wrote: “If these extremely powerful images of a dead Syrian child who was washed up on a beach do not change the European attitude towards refugees, what then?”

The empathy turned out to be temporary, but the image was not forgotten. Just as little as the photo that the South African photographer Kevin Carter took in 1993 of a child in South Sudan who leaned forward from hunger. A vulture looks in the background, as if he waits when the child really falls over. Carter received the Pulitzer Prize The Struggling Girlbut also criticized: why had he left the child to his fate? It was a question that also kept gnawing to Carter: what he had seen and recorded for the world was no longer out of his head. Three months after winning the prize, he committed suicide.

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Collective memory

What the photos have in common is that they clearly indicate that looking away is not an option. And they appeal to a collective memory. One time it is the Piëta, the other time the outset. Sometimes an appeal is made to the images of a Christ figure, or the images of the Holocaust that are roasted on the retina with the Western viewer. For example, the magazine published in 1990 Life A photo of an emaciated David Kirby on his deathbed. He has AIDS and his parents and sister sitting at his deathbed. The father desperately hangs over his son. Kirby gave the photographer permission to take the photo so that the world could see how destructive the disease, which was still a taboo and led to excluding patients.

The consequences of the dehumanization and exclusion of the other were also visible in the photo that Jack Jenkins took in 1957 from fifteen -year -old Elizabeth Eckford. She is on her way to her lessons on the Witte Little Rock Central High School and is scolded by a group of white women. Jenkins laid the segregation flawlessly, nobody could deny that racism had a face.

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The consequence of the ‘dehumanate’ of the other also came to the fore in the photos of Iraqi caught in the Abu Ghraib prison that came out in 2014. Particularly shocking was the image of a prisoner who stood on a box, dressed in a black cape with a Ku Klux Klan-like hood, spread the arms. Like a kind of Jesus on the cross – although this man seems to be being substantiated. A reverse Piëta, as it were: what was seen in American opinion as a justification before September 11, 2001 changed because of these photos. The cruelty of torturing Americans who were lost in the aftermath of the attacks all humanity was visible to the general public.

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The collective memory also appealed in 1992, when images of Broodmagere Bosnian prisoners behind barbed wire showed that ethnic cleansing took place. Looking away had become impossible after seeing these images. Although there was also a discussion here whether the men were actually stuck behind barbed wire, the association with the photos taken immediately after the liberation of Auschwitz were evident. The photos of Jews who had barely survived the concentration camp had also led to the atrocities of the Nazis even to be denying even in Germany.

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Can public opinion only be changed with a human face, and especially with that of a child, from the need to grasp a whole history in one image? Usually it is, but you don’t have to. In 1968 the astronaut William otherwise took a photo of the earth from the Apollo 8. The photo, Earthrisewho had to show the technical ingenuity of man, also became the model of the vulnerability of the earth, on which man in all its (in) humanity turns out to be a crumb. A crumb that can use some protection.

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Correction: An earlier version said that it was unknown what had become Carter in the child’s photo. That is incorrect: almost twenty years after taking the photo it turned out that it was not a girl, but a boy: Kong Nyong, who died in 2007.

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