“Nothing I have seen — in photographs or in real life — ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. When I looked at these images, something broke. Some limit had been reached.”
Susan Sontag, on her reaction to seeing images from the Nazi atrocities in Europe, from her seminal 1977 book On Photography. Via Diverting Focus: Trump is already numbing us to the horrific images his plans would create, by Philip Kennicott. Washington Post, July 4, 2024. (Diverting Focus is the headline in the print edition.)
Kennicott reflects on the power of documentary photography to act as a kind of “photographic concience” in society and Trump's efforts to desensitize us to its effects.

Group selfie, Codeavor India National Event. 6 April 2023. CC-BY

I was lucky enough to be the “guest of honor” and keynote speaker at the 2024 Codeavor India National Event in Delhi. Codeavor is a kind of international hackathon and science fair with over 300,000 kids from 70+ countries using robotics, AI, and design thinking to develop their own solutions to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

I was there representing the Museum of Solutions and there was a line of kids wanting my autograph [!!] and/or a selfie, so we decided to try a group selfie to save some time. :) :)

To the right of the frame with a big smile on his face is Dr. Sreejit Chakrabarty, Director of AI at GEMS Education in Dubai — a brilliant guy and fun to be with!

Such moments represent

I stumbled across the kind of scene that can momentarily catch you off guard — four teenage girls playing trumpets and trombones in a dirt yard adjacent to a half-built church on a hill, on the edge of a town called Beni. There was something haunting about that sound in that place. Storm clouds rolled in, as they did most afternoons, and the air became heavy. It seemed to keep the sharp metallic notes from floating too far away. I knew the scene had no direct link to the Ebola story I was reporting, but I shot it anyway, trying not to disturb the girls. I wasn’t sure the image would be published, but I felt the moment was still important. These girls wanted to be better musicians and were rehearsing to improve. It's easy to get caught up in the hype and drama surrounding conflict or a catastrophic epidemic, but such moments represent what's happening on the ground as much as any scene more obviously related to the Ebola narrative. It’s a quiet reflection of daily life amid an unfolding tragedy.
Photographer Finbarr O'Reilly, @finbarroreilly, commenting on his photo Democratic Republic of Congo in The Year In Pictures, New York Times, 15 December 2019