Scrolling Through the Pain of Others:

Losing Sight of the Firebrand Art of Seeing

Images of human suffering circulate the world like money should, freely. They have done so for centuries. Writing in the mid-1930s, Virginia Woolf described a world ‘bursting with misery’, where ‘On every placard and every street corner was Death; or worse— tyranny; brutality; torture; the fall of civilization; the end of freedom.’ Writing today, Woolf …