When visibility becomes a substitute for action

IIn June 2020, millions of black squares appeared across Instagram. For 24 hours, feeds that normally promoted photography, fashion, travel, food and personal brands became declarations of solidarity with Black lives. The image spread rapidly because it was simple and immediately recognisable. It allowed people to communicate concern, grief, outrage or support through a single visual gesture. Yet as the squares multiplied, another question emerged: why did a black square feel like evidence that something had happened?

The square did not document a protest, record an act of violence, identify a victim or show any of the conditions that had brought people into the streets. It showed only that someone had chosen to post a black square. Yet across millions of screens, the accumulation of those squares began to function as a kind of proof. They made participation visible. They turned an otherwise private position into a public image, and the image into something that could be counted, shared and seen.

That distinction matters because photography has always had an uneasy relationship with action. We often treat the photograph as evidence that something happened, but the photograph only proves that a camera was there and that somebody chose to make, preserve or circulate an image. The difference is easy to overlook. An image can establish visibility without establishing consequence.

Blackout Tuesday exposed that distinction unusually clearly. The black square was not really a photograph in the conventional sense, but it behaved like one. It occupied the same visual economy. It appeared in the feed, demanded attention, communicated a position and became part of a collective picture. Its meaning came partly from repetition: one black square could be dismissed as a gesture, millions could look like a movement.

But movements are not made simply by becoming visible.

This is one of the strange consequences of social media photography. We have become exceptionally good at displaying where we stand and less interested in asking what standing there requires. The photograph is perfectly suited to this because it compresses intention into an object that can circulate without carrying the work that intention might demand. A photograph can say, I was here, I saw this, I care about this, without telling us what happened before the shutter or what will happen afterwards.

The problem is not dishonesty. That would be too easy an explanation. Someone can post an image sincerely and still mistake expression for intervention. The more troubling possibility is that sincerity itself has become enough to satisfy the demands of visibility.

Consider the protest photograph. Images of demonstrations have long helped movements communicate their scale and urgency. They can expose violence, document presence and challenge official accounts. But once the photograph enters the media cycle, something else happens. The protest becomes an image of protest, and the image can begin to stand in for the political work that produced it.

We have seen this repeatedly in the representation of Black protest. A photograph of people marching can become an emblem of resistance. A photograph of a confrontation with police can become evidence of injustice. These images can be indispensable, particularly when institutions dispute what happened. Yet the circulation of the photograph can also create a peculiar endpoint. Once the image has been published, shared and admired, the viewer has been given something to do with their attention. They have looked. They have reacted. They have perhaps reposted.

The danger is that looking can begin to feel like participation.

This is not a problem created by Instagram alone. Photography has always offered a way of encountering suffering without necessarily encountering responsibility. Susan Sontag's writing on the circulation of photographs of pain remains useful here, not because every photograph of suffering produces indifference, but because looking is never politically neutral simply because it feels emotionally powerful. The image can move us without moving anything else.

For Black photographers, this contradiction is particularly difficult because visibility has never been an uncomplicated good. To be visible can mean recognition, authorship and the possibility of correcting an image imposed by others. It can also mean exposure, surveillance and the continued consumption of Black suffering as visual material.

The history of photography is full of examples where Black bodies became available to the camera before Black people became equally able to control what the camera meant. Contemporary platforms have changed the technology without eliminating that imbalance. A Black photograph can now travel further and faster than ever, but circulation does not automatically transfer control. The image can still be detached from its maker, stripped of context and absorbed into somebody else's visual language.

This makes the black square worth returning to. Its power came precisely from refusing the usual photographic demand to show something. It did not show a Black body in pain. It did not reproduce violence. It did not ask viewers to consume another image of suffering. There was something valuable in that refusal.

But the square also revealed how quickly visibility can become its own reward. Posting became measurable. Profiles could be inspected. Silence could be noticed. The question of whether someone had posted became, for a moment, easier to answer than the more difficult questions of what they believed, what they were prepared to change, what they would risk, what they would fund or what they would continue doing once the feed returned to normal.

The image provided closure where the politics did not.

That is perhaps the deeper lesson for photography. We often talk about representation as though the central problem were who appears in the frame. But there is another question: what do we believe the frame has accomplished by making something visible?

A photograph can reveal. It can also relieve.

It can give a person the feeling of having witnessed something without requiring them to remain with it. It can allow an institution to demonstrate awareness without altering its practices. It can allow a publication to signal solidarity while leaving its commissioning structures untouched. It can allow a photographer to produce an eloquent image about inequality while remaining comfortably outside the relationships that reproduce it.

None of this makes the photograph useless. Quite the opposite. It makes the photograph more consequential because we need to become more precise about what it actually does.

Perhaps the problem with the black square was never that it was too little. In some circumstances, a small gesture is exactly that, a beginning. The problem came when the image was allowed to become the evidence of completion.

The square eventually disappeared beneath everything else in the feed. That was its nature. It was designed to occupy attention briefly, become part of a collective image and then give way to the next thing.

What remains interesting is not whether the people who posted it cared. It is what the gesture revealed about a culture in which care increasingly needs an image before it feels real.

Photography has taught us to trust what we can see. Social media has taught us to show that we have seen it. Somewhere between those two habits, visibility acquired the appearance of action.

And perhaps that is the question worth carrying forward whenever we encounter an image that tells us, very clearly, where someone stands: what happened after the photograph?