Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

How do we regard the pain of others? Sontag seems to ask; she develops these essays with her extensive knowledge of photography and art--the book almost reads like an extension from Sontag's On Photography.

Sontag identifies the privilege of regarding pain in locales all over the world through photography as "a quintessential modern experience" provided through the "professional, specialized tourists known as journalists."

Depictions of suffering and pain through images are not a new emergence with photography; there is a rich history in painting for such depictions, like in Goya's The Disasters of War. However, Sontag comments that "Goya's images are a synthesis" that claim that "things like this happened," unlike photography's claim to literal representation that are built in formally. Photography unites "two contradictory features"; it is impartial and objective, but also subjectively positioned through the photographer: this allows it to be "both objective record and personal testimony."

Of course, photography is not a transparent copy of an untouched, virgin reality; "to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude"--the photograph is the result of manipulation. Photographs thus transform captured reality, but nostalgia for the original copy leads to criticism of photos that are too "aesthetic." There is here an echo of the connection between surrealism and photography that Sontag explored in On Photography; there is an element of uncontrolled happenstance that goes into the final work.

Sontag likens the photograph to "a quotation, or a maxim or proverb." Photographs have a "deeper bite" than moving images from the television because "memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image." Photographs thus have a functional role in the creation of collective memory. When this occurs, and the photograph is embedded in a specific narrative or is in use by a certain ideology, the shock value of photographs do not wear off. Or as Sontag says, "pathos in the form of a narrative, does not wear out." Her remark reminded me of Milan Kundera's definition of kitsch in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Do photographs of atrocity coerce an ethical response? Sontag begins her essay with this question and returns to this question at the end. Images are disseminated everywhere--they lose the aura of reverent contemplation and are involved in new settings and take on new meanings (a la Walter Benjamin).

And ultimately, Sontag seems to suggest a chasm between the viewer of the photograph and the suffering subject that cannot be bridged: "'We'--this 'we' is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through--don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right."

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