Widening the Lens explores how we look at images and how images look back at us. Each week, I dig into photography, gender, visual literacy, and visual culture with essays that sharpen how we see the world, plus artist highlights that remind us why pictures matter.
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The photographs we can’t forget are often the ones that reveal our own impotence. Two images of children in crisis, separated by seven years of American policy document what happened to them, but also what happened to us as witnesses. We looked, we felt, yet nothing changed, maybe we mistook recognition for accountability. But photographs also live in us another way: they become templates we carry forward, shapes we search for in new moments, desperate to find the happy ending the original image denied us. We fill in the gaps between images and try to write closure into a story that continues.
Children’s bodies have become the currency through which we negotiate questions of power, belonging, and violence in American public life. The Epstein files document how children were commodified and exploited, but they also document something else: the selective application of accountability. Black boxes redact some names (people in power) while exposing others (victims). We see who power chooses to protect even in the moment of revelation.
Two photographs of children, seven years apart, demonstrate both the essential power of witness and its terrible insufficiency: documentation is necessary but not sufficient.
In June 2018, *John Moore's photograph of a crying toddler at the Texas-Mexico border became the defining image of family separation under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy. The image sparked immediate national outrage and legal challenges and later, won the World Press Photo Award. Under intense scrutiny, the administration issued an executive order on June 20, 2018 that changed the policy from separating families to detaining families together. This is journalism working as democracy requires: bearing witness, informing the public, enabling accountability. But the practice of separation never fully stopped. Nearly 3,000 children were separated during the official policy period, and separations continued afterward. Many families were never reunited. Despite this, the photograph succeeded at what photographs can do: document, reveal, create pressure. What it couldn’t do was complete the work.
*A set of 53 images made by Moore on June 12th, 2018 (and captions) offering a fuller picture of events can be seen here, An audio interview with Moore can be found here.
Moore’s 2018 image was of course more than what we can see in a single frame. The child did cry, her mother was detained, but this particular child was not separated from her mother that night. When this detail emerged, some critics claimed the image was misleading. But this critique misunderstands what photographs do. The terror this child felt was real. The policy was real and the photograph made an abstract policy visceral, and the public responded.
Seven years later, on a Tuesday afternoon, January 20, 2026, ICE officers detained five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in his driveway after coming home from his preschool in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. His father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was detained alongside him and later sent to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas. Liam, born in the United States, is an American citizen. For communities of color, for immigrant families, the photograph confirms what they already know: there is no guaranteed safety and the “border” is everywhere. For others, it might be shocking precisely because it violates assumptions about where such scenes belong and who is being targeted.
Again, documentation worked, and the image went viral. A federal judge eventually ordered their release and Liam and his father returned home on Sunday, February 1, 2026. When DHS claimed the father abandoned his son, the photograph, combined with witness testimony, provided counter-evidence.
In our overly saturated image culture we often treat documentation as an endpoint rather than a beginning. We share, we express outrage, we bear witness, and then we stop. We act as if knowing is sufficient, as if the photograph can do the work that only organizing, legislation, and sustained pressure can do. I am guilty of all of this. Writer and critic Susan Sontag, understood this when she wrote: “Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel... But the shocked response must be capable of more than just looking.” Sontag challenges us to be more than consumers of images, and we are in a moment where images are being heavily censored, corrupted and often provide the line between fact and fiction as we have seen increasingly in cases involving state violence.
The Epstein files pose the same question: We have documentation, and will it translate into justice? That depends entirely on whether we understand documentation as creating the conditions for justice while recognizing that justice itself requires us to act on what documentation reveals.
What should we do?
In this dark time, when our reptile brains have been deliberately activated by the DOJ's tactic of dropping three million files at once (with confusing redaction choices), I have been excited, moved, and motivated by the citizen journalists, artists, and others finding ways to reveal / organize the Epstein files so they are not undervalued and under-scrutinized. After all even David Brooks (and many other powerful people in and out of the files) seem to want us to “move on.” These everyday people (doing the work that the DOJ did not do without sharing the addresses of the victims) are working hard. Brilliant examples of creative activism can be found at JMial, The Epstein Visualizer, among many others.
I feel these would have made Sontag happy.
What happens when a photograph becomes so powerful that we see it even when it isn't there?
During Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance (February 8, 2026), a moment caught the attention of millions: the singer approached a young boy, handed him a Grammy award, and told him in Spanish to always believe in yourself. Almost immediately, social media erupted with speculation that the child was Liam Conejo Ramos, the little boy detained by ICE just weeks earlier.
The boy was actually Lincoln Fox Ramadan, a 5-year-old, Argentine Egyptian child actor from Costa Mesa, California. Both Bad Bunny’s publicist and representatives for the Conejo Ramos family confirmed that Liam was not at the Super Bowl.
While many criticized viewers for immediately assuming this boy was Liam, others understood this was meant to symbolize Bad Bunny as a child. This “recognition” was incorrect and rooted in problematic generalizing, and it reveals something important about how images work. Three weeks prior to the Super Bowl we had seen the image of Liam in the blue bunny hat being detained. Then, at the Grammys, on February 1, 2026, Bad Bunny had declared “ICE out” and emphasized the humanity of immigrants. Just seven nights later, his halftime show’s symbolism of community, labour, love, and the diversity of the Americas as a counter narrative to what our current administration would like us to see or believe. For many viewers, the boy reminded them of Liam in his little blue bunny hat and it seemed as if Bad Bunny was making a direct statement by featuring the very child whose image had become synonymous with family separations. Some viewers wanted the boy, Lincoln to be Liam. The misidentification is problematic. And it also reveals something about the psychology of guilt and the desire for resolution. If Lincoln was Liam, if the boy in the blue hat was now holding a Grammy and being told to believe in himself, then the story had a happy ending. But that is not the case.
This moment speaks to the power of one image living in our collective memory. People saw what they wanted / expected to see. Photographs can fill the gaps in our imagination between sorrow and justice, but without sustained action, we are only ever witnessing, never interrupting or closing the distance between what we see and what we allow to continue.
Photographs are strange things, “wild and indeterminate”, to borrow David Campany’s words. The relationship between photographs and activism is fraught with challenges. We live in an age of documentary uncertainty, caught between fact and fiction. This is partly because of photography and its fundamental promiscuity. Images do live in the collective memory but their meanings are multifarious and unstable.
Your writing is amazing 🔥 (this is Vivian from ICP btw!)