Looking At Cataclysms

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Images can lead not only to erroneous comparisons but to misapprehensions of scale. Because of its great distance from the observers, Jupiter fit neatly within the frames of the zillions of photographs taken of it last week. Some of them seemed serenely beautiful, showing small reddish blossoms dotting the planet's darker surface. The information that one of these was a fireball larger than the earth could not be conveyed visually. It had to be explained in words, and even then the mind resisted the preposterous notion that that was what it had seen.

In absolute measurements, the Rwandan refugees filled infinitely less space than that taken up by a single explosion on Jupiter. But, paradoxically, images could not begin to convey the immensities and emormities of these settlements. The frame was too small to contain such an expanse of anguish. Photographers had to resort to visual synecdoche, hoping that a small part of the scene -- a wailing child, an emaciated mother, a pile of corpses in a freshly dug trench -- would suggest the horrors of the whole.

In an important sense, of course, the photographs did just that. They alerted the world to the plight of the Rwandans, just as the snapshots of Jupiter gave earthlings an invaluable cosmic slide show. The danger of images lies not in the information they carry but rather in our propensity to believe -- once we have seen them -- that we have seen the whole picture. The much heralded visual age is nearly upon us, and we can take justifiable pride in our new abilities to look at each other over long distances and to take close- ups of deep space. We should also remember that images do not come with built-in memories or instructions in how they should be read. If we are to understand them correctly, we must still do that work ourselves.