“No one can read of that valorous fight,” the editorial of one newspaper proclaimed, “without a thrill of pride in the boys of the United States Army, who scaled the almost perpendicular crags and wiped out the incensed heathen from the face of Christendom.” President Theodore Roosevelt personally sent a message to Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, military governor of Mindanao, who had ordered the assault, writing, “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.”

Despite their efforts, the campaign failed to elicit any public outcry. Instead, the photograph was turned into a postcard, much like the ones from Wounded Knee or the Philippine-American War, and the spectacle of the massacre reduced to a colonial commodity.

The distance between the past and the present seems indeed to fade in the staged triumphalism of trophy photos. The fact is that we have seen it all before — at Bud Dajo, in Iraq and Afghanistan or, at this very moment, in Gaza.

At a time when we are inundated with images of suffering, the problem is not that we have looked at too many photos but that we haven’t looked closely enough. If the act of bearing witness is to be more than a cliche, we cannot afford to look away. More importantly, we must also have the courage to recognize what it is that we see.