"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...