The Power of the Image and its Misuse
The 27th January 2022 marked the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The theme for this year’s UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations was “Memory, Dignity and Justice.” This time last year, I gave the keynote address for the 76th anniversary at the Auckland’s War Memorial Museum, where hundreds were gathered to remember the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust and honour the survivors who made their way to New Zealand and contributed to the fabric of our society. I told my father Johan Klisser’s story and was also featured on TV 1News evening segment.
On the flanks of Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, it has been unsettling to witness the wave of Holocaust overtones emerging in anti-vaccination protests around the world. Across the US and even in New Zealand, antivaxxers are likening having to show a vaccine pass to having to wear a Yellow Star of David. Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, has urged authorities to stop protesters using the yellow star at COVID demonstrations.
I was shocked and concerned recently when after going to the Anne Frank exhibition, which is touring the country and opened this week in Timaru, a visitor made the comparison between being required to show the vaccine pass and wearing the yellow Star of David. This conversation seeded deep concern in me, and a desire to kindle a conversation about the power of image.
I grew up with a father who experienced the traumatic loss of his parents, seven-year-old brother Leo and countless relatives and friends all exterminated at Auschwitz (over 102,000 Jews across the Netherlands). All Jews were forced to wear a yellow star and the consequence of being caught not doing so was to be shot. At the age of 15, my father was also forced to go to a different school, exempt from public transport and, at the same age as Anne Frank, went into hiding. It goes without saying that the comparison between vaccine passes and the yellow Star of David hits close to the bone.
“During the Nazi era, German authorities reintroduced the Jewish badge or ‘Judenstern’ as a key element in their plan to persecute and eventually to destroy the Jewish population of Europe. They used the badge not only to stigmatise and humiliate Jews but also to segregate them and to watch and control their movements. The badge also facilitated deportation.” Holocaust Encyclopedia.
The comparison to the vaccine pass is an absurd false equivalent: the vaccine and vaccine pass has been designed to protect us from Covid and save us from serious illness, the Yellow Star designed by the Nazis was used to tag Jews; one is intended to protect people’s wellbeing, while the other acted as a primer getting people rounded up, transported to death camps, and ready for slaughter. The deep irony, as Deb Hart the Chair of the Holocaust of Centre of New Zealand recently pointed out in the media, is that Hitler wouldn’t have wanted the Jews to be vaccinated in the first place. He wanted them erased. “In essence, no one is trying to systematically exterminate people who choose not to be vaccinated,” Hart has said. Her comments inspired NZ’s Catholic Newspaper to run an article headlined “Holocaust talk offends”.
The co-opting of Holocaust imagery in this way has found me reflecting more broadly on the ways images are increasingly being distorted and misused. We are living in an uncritical time, where the twin gods of attention commodification and image saturation are propelling people to greater and greater lengths to make a point.
Indeed, in a society where distortions and unhelpful comparisons are used to make captivating headlines, the trivialisation of oppressive regimes to engage the public is becoming more common. A recent example is Afghanistan-stranded New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who has likened the response of the New Zealand government to the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls. In such examples, we see how drawing dramatic comparisons is effective in rapidly mobilising social backing. But the exploitation of message and image is a slippery slope.
When we are bombarded with images and news and social media, we spend very little time becoming truly informed. We imprint narratives on images we see and lean back on these uncritically, repeating the narrative we are fed, to the detriment of origin and fact. A prime example of this is the ‘Wellerman’ sea shanty which went viral on TikTok and other social media last year, with participants of the trend largely ignorant to the lyrics’ origins in whaling.
We know the melody and we can tap along to it, but we don’t know the words. And that’s dangerous. The image loses its integrity, becomes susceptible to morph, and vulnerable to being misused.
Just yesterday, one of China’s most senior diplomats was criticised for promoting misinformation after he posted to Twitter a series of photographs of Syrian children he claimed were children in Afghanistan.
Images are powerful. They are imbued with meaning. They carry the weight of history and culture. What is needed now is a more critical approach to the image.
In the seminal 1972 text Ways of Seeing, art critic John Berger explores not only how visual culture came to dominate society but also how ideologies are created and transmitted via images. Berger argued that the meaning of images is obscured by the ways they are interpreted, and distorted by monetary value. He argues that there is a reverse effect too, by which the representation of people in visual culture impacts the way men and women perceive, and conduct themselves around, one another. In the final chapter of the book, Berger looked critically at modern consumerist society.
The current media climate offers “a perpetual promise of an ever-elusive alternative way of life, depicted through a language of words and images that never cease to seduce us.” The lure to re-narrate images for one’s own advantage is strong. Those who misuse images are not blind to their power. Rather the contrary, they are highly attuned to it.
It is clear that appropriating images that are emotionally and historically charged is dangerous. While the most pressing danger is trivialising history, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Rather than allow ourselves to continue becoming more desensitised to image and symbol, we must fight to preserve and honour meaning. We must learn, and empower others to learn, the language and histories underpinning images — no matter how familiar with them we feel. This is the most minimal koha we can offer the visual in an image-saturated open domain.
This is my attempt to address the power of the image when it comes to misappropriation, the potential for emotional manipulation and personal leverage. All too often once we see something, it’s what we think. Let’s work to make the world a more informed and conscious place, let’s use image to clarify rather than confuse. With our collective consciousness we must accountable to create a safer world.
