Unforgettable Pictures of the Year

We know that images can hold history in place. We forget sometimes that they can also drive it forward. In 1992 Los Angeles exploded over the meaning of pictures of a black man being beaten by white police. And it was pictures -- of spectral women and withered children -- that launched the rescue mission in Somalia. It may have been awkward to have cameras meet the troops when they landed, but wasn't it also appropriate? In a sense it was cameras that had sent them there.

This was a year that disproved the truism that scenes of tragedy all blur together, that photographs of famine in Biafra and Ethiopia, Sudan and then Somalia just pile on in layers, forming a callous around the conscience. Brought face to face one more time with starvation, the world did not just shrug. And pictures gave other conflicts their own unforgettable faces. Some of the video-game visuals from last year's fighting in the Persian Gulf were strangely antiseptic, an invitation to forget that war is the mass production of individual suffering. The photographs from Bosnia-Herzegovina, where war has become serial killing under the guise of politics, made us remember.

Images are an imperfect route to knowledge. They crowd the senses; they can simplify; they can yell. But they make an impact that sets in motion the deeper operations of judgment. The secular faith of the 20th century insists that history is progress, that time's arrow points the human race towards an ever brighter future. Then the world dissolves again into tribal bloodletting, and we wonder whether history is cyclical, always orbiting through the same thickets of hope and misfortune. When we look at news photographs, we bring to them the questions that history forces upon us: What should we think of human affairs? What is to be done? Pictures don't tell us the answers. They tell us why the questions are important.