Photographers and Photography - Is the Camera a Lens?

There is an echo here of depictions of suffering in religious art, especially in portrayals of christian martyrdom. Those pictures offer us suffering as a redemptive force. Is it a secular form of that that we are observing when we look at images of contemporary suffering? Honouring a civic duty as fellow human beings, to engage with the lives and misfortune of others,. to acknowledge, to empathize, and not to turn and walk away.