Politics & Power Quote by Charles Moore

Moore’s modesty isn’t just politeness; it’s a strategic re-centering of moral ownership. By insisting “The photographs were never about me,” he rejects the seductive myth of the heroic observer-the idea that the person holding the camera is the story. In civil-rights imagery, that’s a loaded move. Photographers can become brands, and suffering can become content. Moore swats that temptation away and hands the spotlight back to the people “laying their lives on the line,” a phrase that refuses to let “basic civil rights” sound abstract. It’s blood-and-bone stake, not a civics lesson.

The subtext is accountability: the camera didn’t create courage; it witnessed it. That matters because Moore’s most famous work from Birmingham helped fix national attention on the violence of segregation. His claim is not that images are powerless, but that their power is borrowed-from the subjects’ risk, from their vulnerability, from the state’s brutality exposed in daylight.

Then comes the tonal pivot: “I can’t believe…” and the emphatic “ANY” operate like a moral double-take, a refusal to normalize what America once normalized. It’s not naive disbelief; it’s retrospective indictment. The line is aimed at the present as much as the past, a warning about how quickly the unthinkable becomes policy when people stop being shocked.

“The times were appalling” lands bluntly, almost understating the horror. That restraint is its own rhetoric: he doesn’t need to embellish. The photographs already did the screaming.