Anyway this “we need to see!” reminds me of how an ex of mine had a framed 19th c. photograph of a white surgeon operating on a black man (you can impute the social dynamics here), and I asked why he had it and he told me he got it at a garage sale but couldn’t tell me why.

I took it from him because that’s not something he needed to casually own. But he had it because he could. People collect lynching postcards, too.

I think people making the case for witnessing underestimate the speed at which atrocity images become ephemera.