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

A series of essays on war, the international atrocities covered by photojournalists, and the detachment of those consuming the images produced. I haven't read the author's On Photography, which seems to be a lightning rod for controversy in the photo world, but Regarding the Pain of Others is a series of thoughtful musings about the role of still images in post-industrial societies. It begins with a summary of Virginia Woolf's response to the Spanish Civil War as viewed through its photographs, and the rest of the essays follow this distant position, this stance of a passive watcher of war photographs.

Sontag contends that there is a vital distinction between the representations of war in paintings and photographs: a photograph exists as both an aesthetic object and a piece of documentary evidence, and these two purposes undermine one another. (Photojournalists are condemned if their news photos seem too slick; photographs that look haphazard and slapdash are valued as more authentic than carefully composed shots.) She questions the documentary role by examining the history of staged news photographs, and her meditations on memory and the longevity of "shock value" are persuasive.

Unfortunately, Sontag ignores most of the practical distinctions that dictate why particular photographs are published and disseminated; she seems to believe photographers are auteurs who snap away without interference from publications or editors. (This independence may be true of select superstars in the field, but the vast newsroom rank-and-file are fulfilling either the house style or the demands of the freelance market.) Sontag seems incurious about the nuts-and-bolts of the media culture that chooses which particular frame to publish from a photographer's six hundred shots. This selection process is at least as important as the final published image, but it is beyond the ken of the passive consumer, and thus beyond the scope of Regarding the Pain of Others.

Sontag's focus is concentrated on atrocity photographs as isolated objects that produce an emotional response -- disgust, sorrow, apathy -- but not necessarily a corresponding physical response. We may look at images of distant massacres and feel unhappy without necessarily acting to stop future massacres. This, however, is not a sin limited to photographs in Sontag's view: "Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching. But watching up close--without the mediation of an image--is still just watching." [117] As a solution to their misleading nature, Sontag suggests that perhaps the photograph should be knocked from its pedestal of documentary truth and returned to consciously created art that aims for subjective, not absolute, truths. But this, too, is a complaint originating from the passive consumer. Photojournalists already know that their photographs condense a complicated situation into a single subjective interpretation. ( )

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/... ( )

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. ( )