Editor’s Note: This week’s Time magazine featured an 18-year-old Afghan girl named Aisha on the cover. Aisha’s face is framed with dark hair and a loose scarf; it looks like any other portrait Time might publish. Except there is something missing: Aisha’s nose. Her nose and ears were cut off as punishment for running away from abusive in-laws—members of the Taliban handed down this punishment. Her portrait appears next to the words “What happens if we leave Afghanistan.”

MMW has decided not republish the photo of Aisha that appears on this week’s edition of Time magazine or include a link to it.

Sara: In a way, all photographers exploit their subjects. It is a profession, after all, and the bottom line involves distributing the photos and making a living from that distribution. Sourcing that argument, we can also say that all representational artists are of a manner exploitative, since they draw on human experiences that aren’t their own and create photos that often only cater to markets with little understanding of the represented experience.  And then they sell or display that art, using it however they please. But in a visually saturated culture, photographs are the exploitative currency of choice. They capture our bodies in vignettes, bits of remaining shrapnel long after the end of a war. They hold what Susan Sontag called “the presumption of veracity,” which gives them unparalleled authority.

The Time cover is no exception to this. It is, by all accounts, a horrifying photo, shot like Steve McCurry’s frank 1984 portrait of Sharbat Gula at a refugee camp. It bears startling similarity to some of Sebastiao Salgado’s photos—photos that have themselves been called “poverty porn” for their alleged attempt to capture and own the unreachable experience of the Global South. And while there is a long American media history of using the stories and photos of Afghan women to advocate for political action (which in the end has very little to do with those women), the photograph itself is rarely ever the culprit.

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