"Regarding the Pain of Others" by Susan Sontag (published 2003)
This is not a review, but more of a synopsis of Susan Sontag’s 2003 book titled “Regarding the Pain of Others”. Highlighted within it are points that I believe to be the most important particularly for figuring out how to think about news in recent years, something that has become more of a problem for me as I’ve matured. A topic that I couldn’t fit into this is regarding advertising images (“Advertising photographs are often just as ambitious, artful, slyly casual, transgressive, ironic, and solemn as art photography”).
In “Regarding the Pain of Others”, Susan Sontag (1933 – 2004) writes about the phenomenon of photography in relation to documenting war. While painting and other forms of art are understood as the creator’s interpretation of the violence of war (for example, Goya did not paint from life, but conjured up the image of war from his experience and view of it: terrible, violent, earth-shattering), the photograph is typically seen as evidence, regarded as matter-of-fact, and taken for the complete truth, all because the nature of this form is the capturing of a “real” image. However, both forms of representation require critical thinking in order to understand the full “picture”. Artist’s intent for example:
“With Goya, a new standard of responsiveness to suffering enters art… the account of war’s cruelties is fashioned as an assault on the sensibility of the viewer…”
The “standard of responsiveness” to violence is what Sontag is interested in. What are viewers to feel when presented with images of war? Shock? Disgust? Compassion? Sympathy (a naïve thing to feel in privileged countries)? Horror? Pity? Most times, Sontag claims, photographs of war are intended to say something like: ‘look at this awful situation, how can the world be so horrible, war should never have ever happened, and should never happen again’. But even with this intention, the problem arises not from those thoughts, but from the the deep and informed bit of knowledge that, even as one witnesses war, one can do absolutely nothing to prevent it from happening in the world.
As for photographs, many of them taken by professional war photographers – they are also shown to gain a responsive audience. One might think that the photographer is just there standing by, ready to take the right shot of violence (which happens a lot – once a solider yelled at a photographer something like “are you waiting to take a picture when the bomb explodes so you can 'shoot' the corpses?”), however there have been times when even these kinds of photos – presented as historical record - are constructed. Sontag gives the example of a picture titled “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg”. The photo shows a solider in a cove of boulders with a rifle propped up against a barricade of rocks. This photo, taken by the Brady team, was a recreation. The solider was moved from where he had died on the field to this new site, and the gun was literally propped up against the rock (the gun was not even a sharpshooter’s gun). Why was this staging necessary? Sontag does not say this, but it could be believable that this was a way of glorifying war by creating a “set” for a fallen hero. And this is not the only example of this happening. Even the photograph of the men raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945 was staged. Sontag describes even more within this book.
All of these different ideologies playing into how war is understood are presented by Sontag. Full of glory? Full of pain? Full of shame? Heroism and bravery? What of photos of extreme violence? It should not be surprising that NBC censored much of the war footage during the start of the occupation in Iraq. Americans were not ready for, as Sontag says:
“what superiority could wreak: the fate of thousands of Iraqi conscripts… carpet bombed with explosives, napalm, radioactive DU rounds… in the era of tele-controlled warfare against innumerable enemies of American power, policies about what is to be seen and not seen by the public are still being worked out. Television news producers and newspaper and magazine photo editors make decisions every day which firm up the wavering consensus about the boundaries of public knowledge. Often their decisions are cast as judgements about ‘good taste’ – always a repressive standard when invoked by institutions. Staying within the bounds of good taste was primarily the reason given for not showing any of the horrific pictures of the dead taken at the site of the World Trade Center in the immediate aftermath of the attack on September 11, 2001.”
This is all to say that much goes into viewing an image of war, in whatever form. There are many questions to ask about it, after viewing the image for itself. What is being said? Who is saying it? Is it authentic? What are the possible interpretations of it? What is the story? What is known and what is still being looked into? One thing Sontag posits is the idea that the violence and horror of war wreaked on privileged nations is not nearly as widely exposed as others:
“The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.”
Perhaps this is true, and it is worth considering. Are nations afraid to be seen as weak? Or are nations too weak to view their own dying and deceased?
War imagery can also be intended it appall its viewers. But appalled at whom? The United States has a Holocaust Museum. Isn’t it notable, Sontag suggests, that the U.S. does not have a slavery museum? Or a museum about the history of American wars? No, not many see images with or without their captions regarding the American wars – nothing dedicated to the atomic bomb, or even the guerrilla warfare in the Philippines. Why? Sontag claims it is because it would be a “most unpatriotic endeavor”.
What now? Sontag wrote “Regarding the Pain of Others” in 2003, and now we are bombarded with even more images of violence – not wars per se, but violence. The recent massacre in Las Vegas, the devastating effects of Hurricane Maria, the situation with Spain and Catalonia, etc. What should the individual feel? Sympathetic? Sontag's take on it is thus:
“Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent – if not an inappropriate – response. To set aside sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection of how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to our suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful stirring images supply only an initial spark.”
Taking a step back from the actual text, a couple straightforward ideas stick out. First, that to blame politics for war is almost idiotic given its history. Two, that unless one has experienced war for himself or herself, the spectator will never be able to fathom what it truly means: that war itself becomes *normal* for those involved in it (see Jeff Wall’s 1992 art photograph “Dead Troops Talk”).
In “Regarding the Pain of Others”, Susan Sontag (1933 – 2004) writes about the phenomenon of photography in relation to documenting war. While painting and other forms of art are understood as the creator’s interpretation of the violence of war (for example, Goya did not paint from life, but conjured up the image of war from his experience and view of it: terrible, violent, earth-shattering), the photograph is typically seen as evidence, regarded as matter-of-fact, and taken for the complete truth, all because the nature of this form is the capturing of a “real” image. However, both forms of representation require critical thinking in order to understand the full “picture”. Artist’s intent for example:
“With Goya, a new standard of responsiveness to suffering enters art… the account of war’s cruelties is fashioned as an assault on the sensibility of the viewer…”
The “standard of responsiveness” to violence is what Sontag is interested in. What are viewers to feel when presented with images of war? Shock? Disgust? Compassion? Sympathy (a naïve thing to feel in privileged countries)? Horror? Pity? Most times, Sontag claims, photographs of war are intended to say something like: ‘look at this awful situation, how can the world be so horrible, war should never have ever happened, and should never happen again’. But even with this intention, the problem arises not from those thoughts, but from the the deep and informed bit of knowledge that, even as one witnesses war, one can do absolutely nothing to prevent it from happening in the world.
As for photographs, many of them taken by professional war photographers – they are also shown to gain a responsive audience. One might think that the photographer is just there standing by, ready to take the right shot of violence (which happens a lot – once a solider yelled at a photographer something like “are you waiting to take a picture when the bomb explodes so you can 'shoot' the corpses?”), however there have been times when even these kinds of photos – presented as historical record - are constructed. Sontag gives the example of a picture titled “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg”. The photo shows a solider in a cove of boulders with a rifle propped up against a barricade of rocks. This photo, taken by the Brady team, was a recreation. The solider was moved from where he had died on the field to this new site, and the gun was literally propped up against the rock (the gun was not even a sharpshooter’s gun). Why was this staging necessary? Sontag does not say this, but it could be believable that this was a way of glorifying war by creating a “set” for a fallen hero. And this is not the only example of this happening. Even the photograph of the men raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945 was staged. Sontag describes even more within this book.
All of these different ideologies playing into how war is understood are presented by Sontag. Full of glory? Full of pain? Full of shame? Heroism and bravery? What of photos of extreme violence? It should not be surprising that NBC censored much of the war footage during the start of the occupation in Iraq. Americans were not ready for, as Sontag says:
“what superiority could wreak: the fate of thousands of Iraqi conscripts… carpet bombed with explosives, napalm, radioactive DU rounds… in the era of tele-controlled warfare against innumerable enemies of American power, policies about what is to be seen and not seen by the public are still being worked out. Television news producers and newspaper and magazine photo editors make decisions every day which firm up the wavering consensus about the boundaries of public knowledge. Often their decisions are cast as judgements about ‘good taste’ – always a repressive standard when invoked by institutions. Staying within the bounds of good taste was primarily the reason given for not showing any of the horrific pictures of the dead taken at the site of the World Trade Center in the immediate aftermath of the attack on September 11, 2001.”
This is all to say that much goes into viewing an image of war, in whatever form. There are many questions to ask about it, after viewing the image for itself. What is being said? Who is saying it? Is it authentic? What are the possible interpretations of it? What is the story? What is known and what is still being looked into? One thing Sontag posits is the idea that the violence and horror of war wreaked on privileged nations is not nearly as widely exposed as others:
“The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.”
Perhaps this is true, and it is worth considering. Are nations afraid to be seen as weak? Or are nations too weak to view their own dying and deceased?
War imagery can also be intended it appall its viewers. But appalled at whom? The United States has a Holocaust Museum. Isn’t it notable, Sontag suggests, that the U.S. does not have a slavery museum? Or a museum about the history of American wars? No, not many see images with or without their captions regarding the American wars – nothing dedicated to the atomic bomb, or even the guerrilla warfare in the Philippines. Why? Sontag claims it is because it would be a “most unpatriotic endeavor”.
What now? Sontag wrote “Regarding the Pain of Others” in 2003, and now we are bombarded with even more images of violence – not wars per se, but violence. The recent massacre in Las Vegas, the devastating effects of Hurricane Maria, the situation with Spain and Catalonia, etc. What should the individual feel? Sympathetic? Sontag's take on it is thus:
“Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent – if not an inappropriate – response. To set aside sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection of how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to our suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful stirring images supply only an initial spark.”
Taking a step back from the actual text, a couple straightforward ideas stick out. First, that to blame politics for war is almost idiotic given its history. Two, that unless one has experienced war for himself or herself, the spectator will never be able to fathom what it truly means: that war itself becomes *normal* for those involved in it (see Jeff Wall’s 1992 art photograph “Dead Troops Talk”).
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