Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Moore

Moore is arguing for the political agency of photography, but he does it with the plain-spoken confidence of someone who’s watched images outlive arguments. The repetition in “can and do” reads like a preemptive rebuttal to the familiar cynic’s shrug: that pictures are just decoration, that outrage is fleeting, that “awareness” is a weak verb. He’s insisting on causality, not vibes.

The key move is how he narrows the claim to “strong images of historical events.” Not any photo, not aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake, but images that latch onto public memory and become shorthand for a whole moral indictment. The subtext is editorial: what counts as “strong” is never neutral. Composition, timing, access, publication, and the institutions that circulate a photograph all decide whether an event becomes “historical” in the first place. Moore’s sentence quietly compresses that machinery into a single word, as if impact is a natural property of the image rather than a product of selection and power.

Context matters here because Moore (best known for documenting Northern Ireland and later South Africa) worked in spaces where the camera could be both witness and weapon. His claim carries the weight of someone who has seen photographs used to puncture official narratives, to humanize the dehumanized, to force distant audiences into proximity. “They can help with change” is modest on purpose: images rarely topple systems alone, but they can supply the spark, the evidence, the shared reference point that movements and journalists need to make denial harder and action more imaginable.