In June 1963, the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức sat down at a busy Saigon intersection and set himself on fire to protest the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of Buddhists. Most people who know about this event never read about it. They saw it, in Malcolm Browne’s photograph. That’s the heart of Michelle Murray Yang’s “Still Burning”: the photograph is what kept the protest alive.

Đức’s body became a visual representation of the suffering other Buddhists were living through under the regime. He wasn’t only experiencing violence; he turned it into a symbol, showing how a body can say what words sometimes can’t. But Yang argues that the symbol needed the camera. The photo freezes what she calls the “about to die” moment, a person caught between life and death, and it pushes viewers to respond. It didn’t just record a protest; it became one. American clergy even ran it in newspaper ads with the caption “We too protest.” Long after Đức’s death, the image kept doing political work.

This connects to what we’ve discussed about bodies in protest. In The Strike and Foster’s “Choreographies of Protest,” the body becomes political when it’s put in front of an audience. Yang adds that the audience doesn’t have to be standing on the street. A photograph lets a body reach people thousands of miles away and decades later.

Her argument is still relevant today. In February 2024, Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty Air Force member, livestreamed his self-immolation outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest U.S. support for the war in Gaza. He asked that the footage be preserved and reported on, so he clearly understood what Yang describes: the image is part of the protest. Twitch took the video down, but it kept spreading on other sites. In 1963 the question was whether newspapers would print the photo. Now it’s whether platforms let the video circulate. Either way, someone other than the protester decides whether the body gets seen.

Still, being seen isn’t the same as changing anything. Browne’s photo made the world look, but does looking actually lead anywhere? So I’ll leave you with the question I keep coming back to: can making someone’s suffering visible change how we understand injustice, and if it does, is that enough to create real social change?