Follow up 🧵 on this.

Extremely timely article on this subject from Teju Cole 

The author argues that modern photography captures the dramatic visuals of disaster—smoke-choked skies, burning buildings, and fleeing figures—but often falls short of conveying the suffocating, visceral experience of being near a disaster. 

Photographs can freeze a moment of devastation with striking colors and composition, yet their impact is fleeting, often consumed as news and quickly replaced. We see this in storm photography. There’s very few “timeless” tornado or hurricane photos that make it outside the weather community, which is specifically mentioned in the article. 

It’s suggested the sheer oversupply of such images dilutes their emotional weight, reducing them to “snapshots” of ongoing disasters. This underscores the limitations of photography in capturing the full reality of disasters, leaving viewers at a distance from the lived experience.