Why does a war photo make a fortune?

Most newspapers in Barcelona and Madrid agree today with their cover photograph: a fallen and unexploded missile in a Syrian field. There are variations: El País shows it next to a child calmly walking away from it, in La Vanguardia we see the projectile accompanied by some sheep, and in ARA, several people appear around it, one of whom is taking a picture of it with their mobile phone. We have a thousand ways to confront each other based on sex, age, religion, money, ethnicity, beliefs, language, territory, or because someone looked at me strangely, but one thing unites the human species as a whole: pulling out our mobile phones to photograph what can give us some likes, even if it carries severe potential danger. The repetition of the same image in newspapers of different leanings has made me think about the last (and again, brilliant) article by Ferran Sáez, about war photographs. The professor argues: 'The new puritanism – which is not moralistic in the strict sense of the term, but only aesthetic and emotional – imposes a kind of collective aversion to anything that might be too intense, too real, or too uncomfortable.'

I would say that, in this case, a not insignificant factor is added. We have been seeing images of explosions for many days, and they all, like Tolstoy's happy families, resemble each other in their sterility: a gray city from afar and a puff of smoke rising to the sky. This other image, on the other hand, has great aesthetic and symbolic power because it shows the contrast between mundane life and the sinister amalgam of metal that could have exploded to take a few souls to the other world. If it had exploded, and some photojournalist had captured its terrible effect, would the press have published the images? And be careful, the question also addresses the reader: would that image have prompted me more to buy the newspaper? Let's talk about it.