Cheap Shots: pity, horror and the price of pointing

Laki Sideris  | 24 August 2026

 Susan Sontag was twelve when she came across photographs of the Holocaust death camps in a book store. Nothing had ever cut her that sharply. Her life split into a before and an after (Sontag 1977, p. 20). Kurt Vonnegut wrote that Lot's wife looked back at the burning city after being told not to. He also wrote that his own book about the Dresden fire-bombing failed, because a pillar of salt wrote it (Vonnegut 1969, pp. 21-22). Salt is what you turn into when you have seen something and can do nothing about it. Photographs are document and provocation. Some are safe and cheap. Some point fingers and are expensive.

On 7 February 2025 Creative Australia announced Khaled Sabsabi and the curator Michael Dagostino as Australia's artistic team for the 2026 Venice Biennale (Creative Australia 2025a). The Australian then said his works glorified terrorists, and Senator Claire Chandler put it to the foreign minister at Question Time. Within hours the board met and decided unanimously not to proceed, saying a prolonged and divisive debate about the selection posed an unacceptable risk to public support for Australia's artistic community. The works referenced were twenty years old and they were not what was selected for Venice. On 2 July the invitation was given back (Kirkham 2025).

The external review said the source of potential controversy was seen to lie in the fact of selecting any artist with heritage connected to the Middle East at a time when conflict in that region was so emotive and polarising (Creative Australia 2025b). The heritage of the artist mattered more than the works.

The same review found the attack was capable of being defended by Creative Australia and that the organisation was not appropriately prepared for it. It examined process and not merit, so it could not find the selection decision wrong. It found the risk had been handled badly.

Somebody was going to have to answer for it, and it would be to the minister and the donors of Creative Australia.

Photographs can be cheap or expensive depending on how the galleries and art bodies have[1] [2]  to deal with them.

[3] [4] [5] A cheap photograph makes you feel something and then it is over. Nobody is directly accused of anything and nothing has to happen next. An expensive photograph points at somebody. It says this person or this organisation did the thing, and the thing was wrong. Then the gallery has to take the call, answer the letter, sit in front of a committee. The viewer or the subject in the picture, or even the photographer does not need to answer: it’s whoever shows the work.

Cheap and expensive is not bad and good. A photograph of something horrific can be cheap. A quiet one can be very expensive. It depends on whether anybody can be blamed for exhibiting it, and whether that person is still around to be angry about it.

Above official policy there is an internal policing, and it does not need to be conscious. A gallery is doing its job, and part of the job is not making problems for the organisation. Across hundreds of small decisions, the cheap picture gets selected more often, and no single decision looks wrong. Herman and Chomsky describe this in the context of news media (Herman & Chomsky 1988).

Sontag writes that "photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one" (Sontag 1977, p. 17). They can shock, and they can strengthen a view a person already holds. That much is tolerable and most edgy work survives. People can feel horror, pity or anger, and nothing about the arrangement that produced the suffering has to change.

What is harder to make visible is where the horror came from. Once the picture, or the words around it, say who owns, decides, benefits or is responsible, it stops being something to make viewers feel and becomes an accusation.

Feeling is cheap. Attribution is expensive[6] [7] .

Steve McCurry photographed an Afghan girl in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Head and shoulders against green, a torn red shawl, eyes straight into the lens. Beautiful, frightened, twelve years old, with an eye colour exotic to western audiences. There is nothing else in the frame. No context. No camp, no border, no war. A face and nothing to do with it. She became a magazine cover, then a poster, then an acceptable symbol for refugees. It is cheap because people feel and do not understand why.

National Geographic found Sharbat Gula again in 2002. She had never seen the photograph and remembered being angry when the stranger took it (Newman 2002).

Nick Ut photographed a girl running down a road in Vietnam after a napalm strike by South Vietnamese aircraft. A chaotic picture of children running, soldiers, smoke. The girl is naked because her clothes burned off (Associated Press 2012). It was expensive at the time because the picture said the war was being fought incompetently. Someone had to answer it. It made work for a government. The war is over and it is cheap now. It hangs in museums. The people who could have been embarrassed are dead or retired, and the photograph still moves people immensely.

The climate crisis, accelerating inequality and geopolitics do not have an obvious subject to point to. There is no single moment when policy happens. So you photograph the aftermath, usually by putting the person in their situation. The doorway, the street with rubble, the messy room screaming poverty. That context is the setting and not the cause. You can see the filthy mattress but you cannot see the policy that keeps the person living in squalor.

Rosler says the pity a documentary photograph invokes relieves the viewer of any responsibility to act. It does more for the photographer and the viewer than for the person in it (Rosler 2004, pp. 177-178). Her own answer is to remove the subject. Her Bowery photographs leave the men out. Sontag says the shock wears off, because the images keep coming and each one has to be more shocking than the last (Sontag 1977, p. 20).

Linfield says this kind of criticism trained people to be ashamed of responding to a photograph at all, and that the anger or pity a viewer feels is a useful response and is often where a political awareness starts (Linfield 2010, pp. xiv-xv).

Poverty porn is an insult and the insult has no clear threshold. Social media and an excess of sympathy used for moral credentialing have made the threshold a very wide one. A photograph of a person in despair claims that the person deserves sympathy. That is a real and true claim and nobody has to answer it. What makes a photograph expensive is not the photographer's seriousness or empathy. It is whether anybody in it can be held to account.

Artists do point at arrangements and power. Barbara Kruger puts the words across the picture (Museum of Modern Art n.d.). Sabsabi cut footage of the towers against President Bush saying: “thank you very much.” (Butler & Lettau 2025). All of it was made and all of it was shown and we can cite it. What it does is raise the price, and the price is not the same for everything you might point a finger at.

Bob Dylan called the protest songs finger pointing songs. And he meant it as a reason for having given up being a protest singer (Heylin 2001). The form easily dates, the finger points to something that does not matter to anyone any more. In the same way Ut's photograph went cheap. Dylan moved to a form that never had to be defended by anyone. By my definition he became cheap.

An excess can be conceded. Somebody went too far, it gets pulled back, and afterwards everybody agrees it was wrong. That is acceptable to power because the process leaves the power structure alone. Nobody has questioned who owns things and who decides. In a way it is a negotiation with power, finding out what it will accept.

The My Lai massacre in 1968 was photographed and published and it cost a great deal at the time. Ronald Haeberle's photographs were published in December 1969, and within days Nixon was publicly responding to the massacre (LIFE 1969; PBS American Experience n.d.). Those photographs now sit as evidence that the press did its job. There is now no controversy. The massacre could be admitted as an atrocity without admitting that the war itself was wrong.

So the cost of a photograph pointing at an excess of power can be high but only temporary. It is settled and then it goes away. The cost changes when the accusation moves to the power structures that produced it. That is the cost that has to be avoided.

I photographed my mother in her casket, her face barely showing. It won an award at Head On and was a finalist in the Moran Photographic Award. It is as affecting as anything I have made and it demands nothing of anybody, because nobody can be blamed for an old woman dying.

The Falling is a work I made with Gretel Taylor. It was a finalist in the 2026 National Photographic Portrait Prize. A woman falls on a dune in a bright pink suit, head tilted back behind dark sunglasses. She is not being hurt by anything. There is nobody in the picture to feel sorry for. The photograph works as a portrait of an artist who works in embodied performance, and as a finger pointed at the power structures endangering the planet.

Gretel devised the concept, where the suit was meant to read as the uniform of the billionaires who have the power to stop what they are doing. The photograph needed help to say that. The accusation had to be in the words, and the words were in the label.

Gretel wrote it. Her sentence said her place-responsive practice questions settler-colonial relationships to land, and that the work reflects on the excess and greed of those with the power to enact change. The gallery rewrote it. Settler-colonial relationships to land became our fraught relationship with the environment. Those with the power to enact change became unchecked consumption driving ecological collapse. Our means everybody. Consumption is something we all do. Both changes take the people pointed at out.

The stated reasons for the re-write were length, clarity, style, privacy or accessibility. After some back and forth, most of the wording was restored. Settler-colonial came back as colonial. Of everything in that sentence the word that did not survive was the one about who took what from whom. The settler.

It is quite comical and of course it does not compare with the examples above. An assistant curator was polite and quick and a publishing manager applied a style guide. Left alone the process produced the version with nobody in it, which looks like a process that is working.

The initial re-write made all of us equally culpable. The restored sentence returns the excess of power. The harder pointing is that the ecocide is power doing what it was built to do, and that the cost was always going to be left unpaid. Removing the source of the ecocide makes the picture a little less expensive.

Sontag's account of what a photograph does to a viewer is where this essay starts. A portrait will move an audience and it will not change anyone. A picture nobody has to answer for is a picture that costs nothing to hang.

You can weep in empathy for a subject in a photograph. You can be shocked by an abuse of power that is later admitted as wrong, and fifty years later quietly hangs in a national gallery. But once a work has shown you how the thing is held together, and what power has to do to bury it, you cannot stop seeing it. That is the difference between cheap and expensive.

Lot's wife was told not to look back at the burning city. She looked, and she paid for it. That is the job. You do the work and accept what comes. Sometimes what comes is a pillar of salt.

References

Associated Press (2012) 'AP "napalm girl" photo from Vietnam War turns 40'.

Butler, R. & Lettau, P. (2025) 'Khaled Sabsabi, Thank You Very Much (2006)', Memo Review, 20 February.

Creative Australia (2025a) Creative Australia announces title and first details of Khaled Sabsabi's presentation, 7 February. Available at https://creative.gov.au/news-events/news/creative-australia-announces-title-and-first-details-khaled-sabsabis-presentation

Creative Australia (2025b) Creative Australia releases external review, 2 July. Available at https://creative.gov.au/news-events/news/creative-australia-releases-external-review

Dylan, B. (2004) Chronicles: Volume One. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Heylin, C. (2001). Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades – Take Two. Penguin.

Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.

Kirkham, S. (2025) 'Unanswered questions in wake of Creative Australia's backflip on Venice Biennale artist Khaled Sabsabi', ABC News, 4 July.

LIFE (1969) 'The Massacre at Mylai', LIFE, 5 December.

Linfield, S. (2010) The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Museum of Modern Art (n.d.) 'Barbara Kruger. Untitled (You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece). 1982'. MoMA collection record.

Newman, C. (2002) 'A Life Revealed', National Geographic, April.

PBS American Experience (n.d.) 'Charlie Company and the Massacre', My Lai.

Rosler, M. (2004) 'In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)', in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975-2001. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Vonnegut, K. (1969) Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte Press.