Susan Sontag

From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been blamed for inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewers. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Marion

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 adulthood

 The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers - seen close-up on the television screen - and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.

It is because, say, the war in Bosnia didn't stop, because leaders claimed it was an intractable situation, that people abroad may have switched off the terrible images. It is because a war, any war, doesn't seem as if it can be stopped that people become less responsive to the horrors. 

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. 

WHO ARE THE 'WE' at whom such shock-pictures are aimed?

That 'we would include not just the sympathizers of a smallish nation or a stateless people fighting for its life, but - a far larger constituency - those only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country. The photographs are a means of making 'real' (or 'more real') matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore.

Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock.

In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture's status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!*

Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience. 'Powerful, fascinating. Sontag is our outstanding contemporary writer in the moralist tradition'Sunday Times 'A coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering'The New York Times 'A far-reaching set of ruminations on human suffering, the nature of goodness, the lures, deceptions and truth of images . . . in short, a summary of what it means to be alive and alert in the twentieth century'Independent 'Sontag is on top form: firing devastating questions'Los Angeles Times 'Simple, elegant, fiercely persuasive'Metro One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

I was ready to slap two stars on this self-important ramble — until Sontag snapped and roasted the French for treating spectacle like it’s philosophy. Her critique of class, privilege, and the West’s luxury to “reflect” on horror instead of surviving it? Sharp enough to save this from the bin.

Still, most of it felt like intellectual navel-gazing. If you're a millennial or zoomer claiming this rewired your brain — congrats, you're the target of Sontag’s side-eye.

Also: this is the third book this month that tricked me into thinking it cared about empathy. It didn’t.

Liana

I was ready to slap two stars on this self-important ramble — until Sontag snapped and roasted the French for treating spectacle like it’s philosophy. Her critique of class, privilege, and the West’s luxury to “reflect” on horror instead of surviving it? Sharp enough to save this from the bin.

Still, most of it felt like intellectual navel-gazing. If you're a millennial or zoomer claiming this rewired your brain — congrats, you're the target of Sontag’s side-eye.

Also: this is the third book this month that tricked me into thinking it cared about empathy. It didn’t.

I picked this up to answer some questions i have asked myself since we are now in the times of live streamed genocides. My questions were answered by Sonia Sontag and her philosophy on war photography and its implications for both the victims of war and us the viewers. Christina Sharpe in her poignant book “Ordinary Notes” on her work against museums said “Spectacle is not repair” and Sontag here says “Compassion is an unstable emotion, without action it withers”. It not enough to simply watch or view injustice and it does not do the restorative work we think it does. 

War photography has sometimes the effect of creating exceptional forms of injustice. What of the genocide and famines that are not filmed. The victims of current Sudanese civil war are an example of this as well as gross examples of injustice in modern cities we live in. if you are in South Africa you should care about home demolitions in Cape Town just as much as in the occupied West Bank. An injustice far is normally an injustice close by in another form.

I picked this up to answer some questions i have asked myself since we are now in the times of live streamed genocides. My questions were answered by Sonia Sontag and her philosophy on war photography and its implications for both the victims of war and us the viewers. Christina Sharpe in her poignant book “Ordinary Notes” on her work against museums said “Spectacle is not repair” and Sontag here says “Compassion is an unstable emotion, without action it withers”. It not enough to simply watch or view injustice and it does not do the restorative work we think it does. 

War photography has sometimes the effect of creating exceptional forms of injustice. What of the genocide and famines that are not filmed. The victims of current Sudanese civil war are an example of this as well as gross examples of injustice in modern cities we live in. if you are in South Africa you should care about home demolitions in Cape Town just as much as in the occupied West Bank. An injustice far is normally an injustice close by in another form.

probably a 5 stars if i was smart enough to understand more than half of it 

kiahna

jess

The book that raises lots of questions regarding one's conscience and interpretation about war, subjecting photography as the center of it all. The image of suffering, photography or movie, is a memory that speaks directly, and it speaks in one language to all generations. The danger of exhaustion from the overflow of images of victims of violence is always present, it cannot be evaded in modern world and it should not be treated with artificial measures of media control. Like engagement, exhaustion cannot be a permanent human state. More importantly, despite the risks involved, our duty is not to close eyes for the pain of others. This is, I think, Sontag's conclusion and this is my own, too.

isa/bella

at first i wanted to give this 3 stars because (especially in the beginning of this book) i find sontag's writing style very difficult to read smoothly for some reason, and it took way longer than it should have for me to read my 77 page pdf of this – but the actual contents of the essay are so fascinating, comprehensive, relevant, and even satisfying (in that it addressed - not necessarily answered - questions i've long had about the popularity of gory images online) to warrant 5 stars (despite my strongly disagreeing with a few of the points made)

"That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalisations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? … The frustration of not being able to do anything about what the images show may be translated into an accusation of the indecency of regarding such images, or the indecencies of the way such images are disseminated—flanked, as they may well be, by advertising for emollients, pain relievers, and SUVs. If we could do something about what the images show, we might not care as much about these issues."

An examination of the role of imagery in modern culture considers how depictions of violence, from wartime photographs to footage of the September 11 attacks, are used and how they impact the world. By the author of On Photography. Reprint.

Ana Hein

Deyana

Some favorite excerpts:

"So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. 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 the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may--in ways we might prefer not to image--be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the restitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark" (102).

"Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real--that is, interesting to us...Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media" (109)

A brilliant, clear-eyed new consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity--a daily commonplace in our "society of spectacle." But are viewers inured -or incited--to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock? In her first full-scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001. As John Berger wrote when On Photography was first published, "All future discussions or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." Sontag's new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of "information", "news," "art," and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will be equally essential. It will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world.

Ivan Zarea

This is it. That’s how you write an essay. Eloquent, strong, cognizant of nuance, and thoroughly researched.
Sontag sets up argument carefully, artwork by artwork, bringing in the context of creation and consumption and then meticulously deconstructing every part of it. What is the purpose of a war photograph? How do we define our relationship with a remote conflict? And who are these “we” we talk about? As she says in the introduction, “no ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain” and it sets up the attitude of this short book.

I wish some of the reference material was part of the book and that it was longer. But I guess there's On Photography for that.

Sloan, Kara

(4.5)I enjoy Sontag's writing, and although a bit tautological throughout, each repetition serves the purpose to connect and enlarge on a point made previously; allowing for each chapter to be more of a tangent to the main thesis rather than a linear argument building upon itself. Interesting re-read. Things have certainly changed in the last 10 years, though the arguments made are still more relevant. I would be curious about her take on the impact algorithmic personalization of content and images.

Regarding the Pain of Others

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