The Sound of Silence is a constructed aluminium, rectangular theatre installation where Alfredo Jaar tells the story of the South African photojournalist Kevin Carter and the controversial photograph he took in Sudan during the famine in 1993, the photograph famously known as "The Vulture and The Girl". Using the isolation of light and a narrative of Carters collected writings, to engage the viewer to focus on to a deeper path of understanding the human response to the intricacies of being an eyewitness to another human suffering. To understanding the reverberations of documentary photographs and the ways they can often be seen to exploit their subjects and implicate their makers. The eight-minute long movie allows for the devastating real-life story, to unfold. Alfredo Jaar incorporates restricted lighting that may make one believe that this is the reasoning to bring momentary blindness and a blank mind. The enclosed room that almost brings on a panic of claustrophobia, in which you have been given a seat that directs you and your sense of view directly to the large screen in front of you. …show more content…
We may understand this as Alfredo using the flash to portray the severity of such action. Beginning to understand what Susan Sontag says in Our Failure of Empathy, viewers are often overexposed to such images like The Vulture and The Girl, so the responses can often be numbed. Applying this to the understanding of the flash, we can begin to consider that Jaar may have used the flash to prevent you from being numb to seeing this kind of image, forcing for you to feel raw, vulnerable, exposed, and ready to take in the image for what it is. Given Jaars exploration of journalistic imagery, that he is trying to ensure that these images stay with the viewer as a place on their mind and are not inured to viewing the