The Art of Looking Back

On witness, survival, and the courage to stay present

Distance measured not in miles but in the terrible space between witness and witnessed.

"I saw many people with lost limbs and eyes, children and women among them. The loud cries of pain from the wounded rang in my ears at night. I frequently visited medical facilities, and every time I saw the patients, I could do nothing but pray for them." —Bassam Khabieh

I have been thinking about the act of looking away. How it feels necessary, almost biological—the way we close our eyes during the violent scene in a movie, or scroll past the photograph of the bombed hospital, or change the channel when the footage becomes too much. There is wisdom in this turning away, a kind of mercy we grant ourselves. The human nervous system, after all, was not designed for the relentless parade of catastrophe that technology delivers to our doorstep each morning with our coffee.

But somewhere between self-preservation and willful blindness lies a territory we must learn to navigate with more precision. Because the looking away, which begins as survival, can calcify into something else entirely—a practiced avoidance that serves no one, least of all ourselves.

I think of James Nachtwey, who has spent decades pointing his camera toward what the rest of us cannot bear to see. The genocide in Rwanda. The famine in Somalia. The aftermath of 9/11. When asked why he does this work, he speaks not of heroism but of obligation—the simple, terrible necessity of creating a record. Of saying: this happened. These people existed. Their suffering was real.

"I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated." -James Nachtwey

Or Lynsey Addario, who has photographed conflict zones from Afghanistan to Libya, often as the only woman in rooms full of men who would prefer she weren't there at all. She writes about the peculiar intimacy of documenting someone's worst day, the weight of knowing that your presence might be the only thing standing between their story and oblivion.

These photographers understand something that those of us safe in our living rooms often forget: that witnessing is not the same as consuming. It is not voyeurism dressed up as concern. It is a form of accompaniment, a way of saying to another human being, "I see you. What is happening to you matters."

The difference matters more than we might think. Because what compounds trauma—what makes suffering unbearable beyond the suffering itself—is the suspicion that no one cares. That the world has moved on while you remain trapped in your particular hell. That your pain, however profound, registers as little more than background noise in the great human cacophony.

I suspect this is why the hardest people to find at vigils and protests and town halls are often those who most need the practice of bearing witness: the ones who have never learned to look directly at their own darkness. Who have built their lives around the premise that certain doors should never be opened, certain rooms never entered. They are not being cruel when they change the channel or scroll past the image. They are being terrified.

Because here is the paradox of witness: to truly see another's suffering, we must first be willing to acknowledge our own capacity for it. Not just our capacity to endure pain, but our capacity to inflict it. To be complicit in systems that cause it. To benefit from arrangements that guarantee someone else will pay the price for our comfort.

This is harder than it sounds. It requires what my former Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön calls "staying with the difficulty"—resisting the urge to immediately fix or flee or find someone to blame. It means sitting with the knowledge that we are all both perpetrators and victims, that the line between us and them is thinner than we would like to believe.

I remember reading about photographer Bassam Khabieh in Syria, who spent months documenting the siege of Eastern Ghouta. The images were devastating—children pulled from rubble, mothers wailing over bodies, entire city blocks reduced to concrete dust. But what stayed with me was something the photographer said later: that the hardest part wasn't taking the pictures. It was continuing to believe they mattered. Continuing to believe that someone, somewhere, would see them and feel compelled to act.

This is the faith that witness requires—not that our looking will immediately solve anything, but that it will preserve something essential. A record. A relationship. A recognition that suffering shared is somehow different from suffering endured alone.

The numbing, when it comes, feels like mercy. And sometimes it is. We cannot hold everything. We cannot carry the weight of all the world's pain without eventually buckling under it. The break is necessary. The looking away is human.

But then—and this is where courage lives—we must look back.

Not because it will feel good. Not because we will know what to do with what we see. But because presence, even painful presence, is what dignifies experience. It is what transforms random suffering into something that can be grieved, remembered, learned from.

The war photographers know this. The disaster photographers know this. The mothers who insist on open-casket funerals know this. The protesters who carry pictures of the disappeared know this. They understand that some things are too important to be left to fade quietly in the dark.

We are living in a time that demands witness. Not just the dramatic kind—the kind that makes headlines and wins awards—but the daily kind. The kind that notices when the homeless encampment gets moved again. The kind that remembers the names of the kids who didn't come back to school after the shooting. The kind that sits with friends through divorce and depression and diagnosis without trying to talk them out of their pain.

Being present is what is going to save us. Not because it will prevent future suffering—though sometimes it might. But because it will remind us, again and again, that we are not alone in this. That our pain and joy and fear are part of something larger. That witnessing, in its way, is a form of love.

The camera clicks. The shutter closes. The image is preserved. Someone, somewhere, has said: I was here. I saw. This matters.

And in that moment, the terrible distance between self and other collapses. We remember what we have always known but sometimes forget: that we are all in this together, for better and for worse, until the very end.

Photojournalists Portfolios:

James Nachtwey

Lynsey Addario

Bassam Khabieh

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Image © 2025 Gael MacLean