IT WAS my birthday earlier this week. I suppose birthdays are always something of a moment for reflection. They invariably give us pause for thought, a bit like that famous Paul Gauguin painting from his time on Tahiti enigmatically entitled: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

When you reach a certain vintage, as I have, you tend to think of the time spent on this planet, what you have done and what you might do with the time left. At such moments, it’s not uncommon for many of us to reach for the photo album, albeit most these days being on a computer or external hard drive. Many people, though, still have an old pre-digital album of prints and negatives or, as I recall from growing up, a huge biscuit tin full of them. The photograph and family album are universally cherished.

Countless times in war zones I’ve come across refugees carrying photo albums. Heading into an uncertain future, many might only have had minutes to pack what they can carry but, almost always, photographs are among these most precious of possessions. Many fail to make their escape with such meagre mementoes. In abandoned, bombed-out homes from Bosnia to Somalia, I’ve come across personal photographs scattered among the rubble.

There are few things more poignant than finding such images. To encounter them is to feel a strange mixture of sadness, guilt and curiosity. Who are the people depicted, you ask yourself? What might their lives have been like had they survived?

Mostly they are family snapshots with children laughing, fooling around and playing. Often the people in the pictures are dressed up for a special occasion such as a wedding, birthday or holiday celebrations such as Christmas or the Muslim festival of Eid. Almost always they show happy times and memories before the men with guns and bombs came.

Everyday now, it seems, images of maimed and traumatised children emerge from the slaughterhouse that is Syria and its cities like Aleppo. What, one wonder, will the photo albums of families from there reveal to future generations? Meanwhile, from the comparative comfort of our world, well out of harm’s way from the barrel bombs, phosphorous and chlorine gas, we seem content to debate on Twitter and Facebook about the sensitivity of showing such images from war zones.

We agonise over how much of an intrusion they might be into the suffering and grief of those families often depicted hauling loved ones, bloodied and shrouded in dust, from the concrete catacombs in which they breathed their last. I know all too well the ethical and editorial debates that accompany the making and publication of such photojournalism. It is only right that we should be concerned about the sensitivities surrounding the depiction of such images.

This, though, should not become an excuse for airbrushing them out of our minds, our daily lives, our collective consciousness and from history itself. It is understandable that some might want to do so, but it will not make it go away and not make us better people, either. Many years ago in Central America during the civil war in El Salvador, I watched an Italian colleague raise his camera to take a picture of a wounded little girl just as he had done countless times before. There was an unusually long pause before he lowered the lens, got up from his knees and walked away.

“Are you okay?”, I asked him a short time later. His response said much about the way so many of us feel when confronted with such images. “That’s enough for me, I can’t look at this stuff any more,” was his candid reply. He did not work as a photojournalist in war zones again. His was an understandable response given the proximity and exposure he had experienced over many years.

There are those, however, who want to look away simply because to look is to tarnish their sheltered lives. There are others again who, from a perhaps overly refined sense of political correctness, feel that we have no right to intrude on such pain.

If images like those of wounded children in Aleppo are posted simply for some vicarious shock value, then, of course, we all have a right to object. I for one would be among the first to do so. Most of the images we are seeing, however, are taken either by professional photojournalists or citizen journalists who, more than anything, want us to fully realise the horror of what is happening in Syria. They hope too that they might in some way help stop such atrocities.

History is full of images whose impact has made us think again, brought pressure to bear on politicians or changed the course of events, even if only briefly. Look again at Robert Capa’s images of civilians under bombardment in Madrid in the 1930’s or George Rodger’s nightmarish images of Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in 1945 and the need for such documents is obvious.

I defy anyone also to look at photographer Don McCullin’s harrowing portrait from the 1968 Biafra war and famine of a starving mother with shrivelled breasts attempting to breastfeed her child and say such a picture not only retains the dignity but also gives voice to the subject. That mother looks the viewer straight in the eye, insisting we take action to help those like her. To say that such images should not be seen because they demean those depicted misses the point. One would have thought by now that we might have moved beyond such an argument, but only recently it revealed itself again. I’m talking about the furore over Facebook’s initial efforts to censor one of the most famous photographs of the Vietnam War.

Only after widespread criticisms from news organisations and media experts across the globe was Nick Ut’s Pulitzer prize-winning photograph showing children, including a naked nine-year-old Kim Phuc, fleeing a napalm attack allowed to be shared on social media. Somewhere along the way Facebook had mixed up the definition of a historically important documentary with child pornography but in the end it saw sense.

Making editorial decisions over what is and is not an acceptable image to publish has always been a fine line to tread. Photojournalism, like any reporting, exists to tell the truth, unpalatable, grotesque and upsetting as it often is. I can’t speak for those people suffering in Aleppo but I sense from experience that few would object to the showing of victims’ pictures if doing so helped bring about a halt to the hell through which they are living.

We must not let censorship or sanitisation airbrush atrocities in Syria or elsewhere from our collective sight. Nor should we direct our outrage at those who photograph and publish them. Such photography is the means by which we all bear witness and, without it, the world’s conscience will wither. Let us save our indignation for those who cynically prosecute such wars and order the killing.