The Image and the Viewer

Skimming over Butler again, something caught my eye with regards to images and how they play into a relationship between the subject and the viewer of the image. Butler mentions on page 143 the ability for the "paradigmatically human" (she uses the examples of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden) to reside outside of the frame and that the viewer is "unrepresented" and not captured by the image; interpellation comes into play again, and in a sense this interpellation is... indirect isn't quite the right word, but the viewer is made exactly into that: someone who looks on without being represented, as Butler puts it. Yet this unrepresented viewer holds the power to "capture and subdue, if not eviscerate, the image at hand."

So if the viewer (and by extension the media) has this power over an image and how it is interpreted, I was wondering if how that image is handled (captured, subdued, eviscerated) by a given viewer can change over time--and if the fact that the subject of the image exists "outside the frame" plays a role in any change. Would such an alteration be contingent upon that subject, or could change in how the image is digested occur without that factor (which would perhaps mean a change in the viewer instead)? As Butler mentioned, the pictures of children dying from napalm during the Vietnam War that shocked Americans and moved them outrage; the public reaction shifted with time, but that itself was the result of a subject's change.