As I immersed myself in these dozens
of photos from the past year, I kept thinking about what happened to my
Aunt Shirley and her family more than 30 years ago. I was a senior in
college when she and three of her children were murdered by an arsonist
who set fire to their tenement in Haverhill, Mass. What I recall most
intensely from that dark week is one of Shirley’s younger sisters
seething in front of the television cameras from Boston, keening with
tears of rage and grief, craving revenge.
Over and over, as I looked at these photographs, I saw the same fury
and misery that had stricken Aunt Shirley’s sister, her feral lust to
get even.
I saw it in Aleppo and Nairobi, in Boston and Tehran. I saw it after
typhoons and tornadoes, in refugee camps and in the rubble of collapsed
buildings. But I learned as I looked that it’s better to see the living
shackled to the rack of their unspeakable emotions than to watch those
who are entombed in blank stoicism.
Also, these photos make the reader more human amid the infinite
bombast of our electronic infotainment. The mind-numbing media avalanche
threatens to make war, terrorism and catastrophe banal, to turn the
maimed and the dead into mere meat, as abstract as Lady Gaga’s gown of
raw beef. What many of the pictures here do, though, is turn the shallow
creeks of the general into the profound deeps of the particular —
shocking us awake.
- A 10-year-old boy named Issa lugs a mortar shell in a weapons
factory run by the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo. The photo looks as if it
were taken in some post-apocalyptic dystopia.
- Mariano Rivera, after the last game he pitched at Yankee Stadium,
humbly walks into the shadowy tunnel. No. 42, baseball’s greatest
closer, is a man of deep faith who understood that his unlikely gift
was, of all odd things, throwing a baseball. And he transformed it into a
special ritual that transcended balls and strikes.
- Corey Adams, of California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, sits
on a stump, staring at a fire smoldering near Yosemite National Park.
It’s as if he wearily and warily understands that the flames are obliged
to burn, just as he is obliged to monitor them, in a new kind of
“American Gothic.”
- An Afghan girl reads a book in front of her class in Parwan Province. She and her female classmates are the true change in 2013, the future. It’s not made up of AK-47s and tank shells, razor wire or nerve gas — but girls, suffused with hunger and hope, drinking their fill from the bottomless well of words and, perhaps, wisdom.
— Dana Jennings
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