Susan Sontag is a literary critic in the medium of photography. In this book, and in much of her work, she asks "what meaning are we to draw from a given photograph?"

What does a photo communicate? Especially a photo of human suffering, of pain, or destruction? What are journalists and propagandists "saying" when they publish the graphic loss of life, limb, or dignity? ( )

She covers the ground elegantly, in no particular order. Her style is crisp, firm, and writerly, though not without a self-conscious overlay. She has a bit of a diva's pulsating grandeur, but actually she's more like an athletic dancer, picking her spots and impeccably closing in with pleasing quick-step combinations and leaps. She's probably too irregular to be a scholar's expository ideal, but damn she puts on a fine show. Her mind cracks it along like a circus tamer's whip. You don't have to like her, but it's hard not to salute her. ( )

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Meh. Less wise than well-read. Less brave than praised. ( )

Cursory and effective, I read this in an afternoon. I have never allowed myself access to her fiction but her essays always maintained a welcome gravity. ( )

An analysis of the human response to images of the suffering of others. Mainly relating to pictures of people afflicted by war from Goya's 18th century Disasters of War, to late 20th century conflicts depicted in photographs and film. The book discusses the impact these images have on the viewer and any utility they may have in making a less violent world. The bits I enjoyed most were the things I hadn't considered before. For example, many of the older war photographs were staged or at least had various props (cannon balls etc) moved around for effect. Only with Vietnam and televised war did photographers up their game and probity. Throughout the book she drops in bits and pieces that you feel you should know more about e.g. the RAF bombing Iraq in the 1920s, extermination of the Herero in Namibia, the rape of Nanking. All in all an interesting read and worthy of a re-read. ( )

Not for the faint of heart, but then again, neither is the twin desire/disgust that accompanies the spectator who finds themselves "regarding" (seeing, witnessing, enduring) the pain of others. I have spent very little time combing the internet looking at photographs of atrocities and suffering in my life. Since Sontag offers us no visuals in this short book, I found myself again and again having to search for the images she describes. Thus I have spent a very long day confronting the evil we do, regarding the pain of others, and regarding that regard. And now I am very sad, but also very unsurprised. ( )

This long essay is basically an update of and debate with Sontag's famous book On Photography, which I, unfortunately, haven't read. Published in 2003, shortly before her death, it gives an overview of the history of war photography, from its beginnings, to today's embedded journalists and 24 hour news channels. She covers a lot of ground, but the focus is on the purpose of these images and the evolving effect they have had on viewers as they have become more and more ubiquitous throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Here are some of my favorite quotes (hopefully not taken so out of context that they're hard to decipher!):

I'm fascinated by the topic "fear/avoidance of sincerity/expressions of sincerity," so this really resonates with me:

"Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier, from one's chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority. In fact, deriding the efforts of those who have borne witness in war zones as 'war tourism' is such a recurrent judgement that it has spilled over into the discussion of war photography as a profession."

Interesting point:

"The Holocaust Memorial Museum and the future Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial are about what didn't happen in America, so the memory-work doesn't risk arousing an embittered domestic population against authority. To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture all the evil that was there, and from which the United States - a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history - is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful, belief in American exceptionalism."

Perhaps a bit harsh, but my favorite and a better summary of her main point than I can articulate on my own:

"To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell's flames. Still it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one's sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological maturity."

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Much in the way AIDS and its metaphors is an update of Illness as metaphor, likewise Regarding the pain of others (2004) is an update of On Photography (1977). Unfortunately, the follow-up books are not as original and well-written as the first-conceived editions. Perhaps avoiding a repetition of earlier ideas or arguments, the follow-up books, they are not as sparkling, a mere shadow of the original works.

The title of Regarding the pain of others is ambiguous, based on the possible double meaning of the word "regarding". The essay is therefore as much, but not solely about "pain", but much more about "viewing suffering," i.e. the pain of others.

The essay deals with various types of images, starting with Sixteenth century etchings by Goltzius, and moves on to discuss the graphic work of Hans Ulrich Frank of soldiers killing peasants, dated to 1652 or the end of the Thirty Years' War, and Francisco Goya's early Nineteenth century work, a series of 83 etchings under the title Los Desastres de la Guerra. However, Sontag's essay does not convincingly bear out that these etchings are works of art, and cannot be regarded as the equivalent of journalistic photography. The essay is largely concerned with journalistic and war photography and filmography.

Regarding the pain of others does touch upon the satisfaction derived from watching the suffering of others, or at least images thereof. But the work is far more focused on describing the medium of photography than exploring man's fascination with the images of suffering. This is regrettable, as the ambiguous title gave an outlook on a broad spectrum of interest, which in this essay is only interpreted in the narrow sense of photography. ( )

There were times when Ms. Sontag made excellent points and had me thinking about things from a new point of view, and times when she seemed to write in circles and never really made a point. I liked the book, and I think it says things we need to hear, but even this short book had a lot of extra fluff that seemed to hide the ideas and thoughts that were most important. ( )

An interesting and intelligent meditation on the role of photojournalism in depicting human suffering – focussing especially on the atrocities of war – and the public's reaction to such images. Regarding the Pain of Others presents an intriguing collection of thoughts on the subject marshalled with an extraordinary degree of finesse. This is undoubtedly an important essay in an age when the average citizen is becoming remarkably desensitised to what would once have been considered – not too long ago – quite shocking images. The question that remains, however, is 'what do we do about it?'.

A very interesting long essay about how evil is made visual through photography. I liked this a lot, very thoghtful writing ( )

Academic discussion about the history of documenting war, conflict and death through art/paintings/drawings and then, in more modern times, photography. Contains interesting facts about the evolution of using the camera on battlefields and during the aftermath of massacres, bombings, etc, as well as the ethics involved with of broadcasting and/or censoring the images captured. ( )

I read this as part of a discussion group at The Art Institute of Chicago. The subject of "Regarding the Pain of Others" is "atrocity photography," that sort of photography whose subject is the death or misery of other people. The book was, of course, penned in the shadow of September 11, and it seems, unfortunately, to bear a slightly burdensome responsibility to comment on the importance of things. This, however, has never been a problem for Ms. Sontag. While I appreciated her earlier essay collection, On Photography, more than this photographic excursion (perhaps because it is a better essay collection) I found the insights here worth considering. Perhaps I was put off by her beginning with a reference to Virginia Woolf's book Three Guineas which I did not find persuasive. However, I still found the essays in this miniature tome challenging and thought-provoking. ( )

Susan Sontag’s new book, Regarding the Pain of Others, updates, expands, and in certain respects repudiates her 1977 book On Photography. Where On Photography was quite theoretical and full of jargon, following, as it did, the work of the French critic Roland Barthes, Regarding the Pain of Others is a series of simple ideas written in plain language. The new book is nonetheless, or perhaps more so because of its simplicity, a work of profound and needed philosophy. The core questions of this short book are, Do photographs of the destruction and pain caused by war in any way inhibit such acts? Or do such photos, because of their prevalence, inure us to the pain of others? Where once, as during the Vietnam war, “photography became… a criticism of war” through a public display of the carnage, “[t]his was bound to have consequences,” a “blowback” reaction since the “mainstream media are not in the business of making people feel queasy about the struggles for which they are being mobilized.” Contemporary news media are, rather, in the entertainment business. Thus, in the current war, the media have been willing and eager flag-waving dupes of the military.

These are crucial questions that come at a crucial time. Those who argued against the unilateral invasion of Iraq (for whatever reasons) are the same people who have been arguing against the militarization and corporatization of American culture for years—arguing and, for the most part, losing the argument. Losing, but not for lack of cogent arguments. Rather, the position of the anti-war and anti-corporate legions has been like that of an impoverished, black cat facing down a bulldozer: the bulldozer has the power; it owns the road, and the media that will not publicize the squishing of the cat. So the cat either moves or becomes a martyr to a marginalized few. Even if the squishing of the cat is shown on the evening news, “The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.” Sontag is focused on war, but one could read any type of violence into that sentence: police brutality, racial violence, rape. “Wars are… living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called ‘news,’ features conflict and violence—‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ runs the venerable guidelines of tabloids and twenty-four hour headline news shows—to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.” Before the “ubiquity” of the flood of images portraying “those horrors,” the cat, and the cat’s fellow travelers, “cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward—that is, poor—parts of the world.”

Violence comes in many forms, of course; as the godfather of political science, Karl von Clausewitz, said, “War is politics by other means.” So the first idea that emerges in answer to Sontag’s question, Do photographs of the destruction and pain caused by war in any way inhibit such acts?, is Yes, but with a twist. It is the poor black cat (the person of color, the woman, the trade unionist, the anti-war or –globalization activist, the environmentalist) who is inhibited—perhaps not so much by fear of being harmed or killed as by the apathy of her fellow activists. And perhaps it is the anti-disaster activist—the nice liberal lady watching The News Hour on PBS with her checkbook in hand—who becomes inhibited. What? Another earthquake/famine/genocide in Africa/Asia/South America? Sigh… and she changes the channel, searching for a rerun of Sex in the City. “This seems normal, that is[,] adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.” We do indeed become inured to the pain of others, and violence, as political expediency, keeps people in line, either by killing them or by intimidating them.

We not only become inured, we tend to ignore that which causes cognitive dissonance, that which doesn’t fit with our story of how the world goes. The “[i]ncendiary… footage” of the destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, shown hourly by Al Jazeera, “the Arab-language TV news channel,” “did not tell [viewers] anything about the Israeli army they were not already primed to believe. In contrast, images offering evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera.” Indeed, Rush Limbaugh, among many other thoughtless reactionaries, stated that the images of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were simply exercises in “good old American pornography,” taken by “women” who were “having a good time” and “blow[ing] some steam off.” The revisionist argument of the construction of horror (to win liberal votes, or whatever the excuse is) is just as vexing as having nothing to argue about, of having the rug pulled out from under one’s rhetorical feet by the denial or will ignoring of an incident. For example, in the wake of the (first) Gulf War, “American television viewers weren’t allowed to see footage acquired by NBC (which the network then declined to run) of what [American military] superiority could wreak: the fate of thousands of Iraqi conscripts who, having fled Kuwait City at the end of the war…, were carpet bombed with explosives, napalm, radioactive DU (depleted uranium) rounds, and cluster bombs as they headed north…”

Most disturbing of all is the artist who becomes apathetic in the face of war and other injustices. Artists have good reason to be discouraged these days, anyway, living, as we do, in a (as the Situationist Guy Debord put it) “society of the spectacle.” As Sontag points out (and revises something she went along with in On Photography), it is not that the “spectacle” has become reality (as Debord and his disciple, Baudrillard, insist), which is a “breathtaking provincialism”: the spectacle has simply become a bulldozer with which artists, like the Palestinian refugees in the Jenin camp, cannot compete. This is especially true if the violence on display is portrayed within the iconography of religion (the most recent example is the Abu Ghraib prisoner in the “crucifixion” pose). Artists, and scholars, too, cringe before the spectacle of Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic film of The Passion, but before such spectacles the truth appears dingy, nitpicky, and inconsequential. How are artists and scholars to speak truth to power when the lies are just so damned eye catching? (We may, hopefully, see the beginnings of an answer to this dilemma at the Republican convention in Manhattan this summer: word on the street is that there are plenty of protests planned, but not the conventional, in-your-face gatherings of the masses, but rather more anonymous—and spectacular—works of art will confront the hounds of war.)

“That news about war is disseminated worldwide does not mean that the capacity to think about the suffering of people far away is significantly wider,” Sontag writes—and if there is a problem with the vision expressed in this book, this is it: the author’s sights are set on distant horizons. Wars are inflicted against poor people, women, children and people of color at many distances from the presumed reader of Sontag’s book, including, and in some cases especially, in the United States. The US has been waging several wars against its own people for decades: the war on drugs has done nothing to stop the flow of dangerous substances, and everything to cripple the lives of people of color and the poor. Though never named as such, there is also a war against health care in the US, a war that has turned the elderly into drug smugglers as they import from Canada what they can’t afford in their own nation. Like a “real” war, the American war against healthcare results in thousands of deaths every year.

What activists, artists, scholars, and people of conscience are up against, in the U.S. and around the world, is the “moral defectiveness” of those who are “perennially surprised that depravity exists” and who continue “to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting.” Such persons who stand in the way of compassionate progress have “not reached moral or psychological adulthood.” Howard Zinn, the historian famous for his wonderful A People’s History of the United States, is against such quiescence: “There’s a lot of historical work to be done, a lot of films that need to be made,” a lot of images that still need to be seen, he says in a recent article in The Sun. “War needs to be presented on film in such a way as to encourage the population simply to say no to war.” Zinn suggests specific and practical strategies that the more abstract Sontag does not. If All Quiet on the Western Front, Slaughterhouse-Five, Fahrenheit 9/11 and possibly Cold Mountain are the only anti-war films that stick out from the vast horde of war-glorifying images, then activists need to get busy. We need a revolution in everyday life.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book] ( )

Why concentrate this critique on photography, when other media are equally ineffective? Because, Sontag argues, “all images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic.” Looking at war photography is gawking at traffic accidents, hoping to see blood and bone.

But, of course, so is reading sensational news stories and watching television news. And whatever “the artist’s skill of eye and hand,” a painting depicting suffering remains art, an aesthetic object that we look at in a gallery without concern for the actual events of whatever battle it depicts. At least the photograph — presuming that it actually depicts “the violation of an attractive body,” as most war photographs do not — is presented as news.

And how is one to respond to war? Is it more effective to take a camera into Sarajevo and use it to argue for intervention, or to take up residence there for the purpose of staging Waiting for Godot by candlelight, as did Sontag? How many people were moved by the photography of Christopher Morris, who evacuated himself from the besieged city after having a breakdown? How many were moved by Sontag’s production of Godot?

There is a sense in Regarding the Pain of Others that Sontag is backing away from some of the claims of On Photography, that she discovered in Sarajevo what a glib and facetious stance is deconstruction in the face of destruction. In the concluding chapters, this becomes explicit, as she self-consciously points to two of On Photography’s arguments and argues against them.

“To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism,” she admits. “It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in a rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment … some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.”

This epiphany arrives only when the Manhattan essayist goes to live in Sarajevo. It’s a pity that Sontag didn’t leave her rich part of the world behind more often.

http://ajsomerset.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/regarding-the-pain-of-others/

This was a really quick, rather interesting read. Sontag's essential argument is that the saturation of images of violence through the modern media has begun to inure us to the pain of other human beings. She traces the history of war photography, network decisions about which footage to air, etc. and makes a rather compelling and humane argument. I think it's just about the perfect length, I believe I read it in a couple of evenings and then passed it on to my mom. ( )

In this book, Sontag demonstrates her mastery of the art of eloquent outrage, an art that requires subtlety and restraint, but also an art that, when done well, changes the way you see things every day. She argues that while photographs of devastation, whether from war or natural disasters or human cruelty, are often regarded as "truth," in reality nothing could be more deceiving. When we see a haunting image of some nameless person suffering, our heart goes out to them, but it takes our minds away from more insidious implications. -Emily

This small collection of essays, which explores the ways in which images of war and suffering can effect a populace, was the last thing Sontag published before she died in 2004. In it, she goes through a series of depictions of war and examines what each meant to the intended audience, to the artist, and to posterity.

Read the rest of my review of Regarding the Pain of Others on my blog, The Nerd is the Word.

http://nerdword.blogspot.com/2006/10/45-regarding-pain-of-others.html ( )

This is a powerful and profound book that forces us to rethink our relationship to the steady stream of horrific images of human suffering from locales both nearby and exotic that have increasingly saturated our lives as the mass media have developed over the past two centuries. Sontag rejects simple notions about what it means to, through the media, be specatators to the horrible suffering of others. (E.g., that images of suffering make us callous and indifferent to suffering or move us to a genuine sympathy with others.) Rather, she calls for what might be calld an ethics of spectatorship that requires us to 1) move beyond mere sympathy to analyze our relationship to the suffering we see, and to stop it if we can; and 2) to acknowledge the irreducible, incomparable quality of the suffering of others -- the uniqueness of suffering must be acknowledged, as well as the impossiblity of those who do not suffer to fully understand. ( )