Regarding the Pain of Others

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering of more than a century and a half worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.”

The camera as a tool of expression emerged in the modern era, and since the Crimean War and the American Civil War, the first period it was used to make “news,” technological improvements in photography and other aural-visual media have brought that news into the postmodern era onto screens large and small. Meanwhile, Sontag observes, a cynicism has accompanied the evolution, and photojournalism of war has often been degraded as reflecting a taste for the lurid. The “specialized tourists” often hold as little esteem as paparazzi chasing celebrities. Yet deriding the profession of photographing at the front as “war tourism,” Sontag later explains, is easy and safe from the living room or palm pilot, but it is a betrayal of those who bear witness, who are committed to a stance, who are appreciated for their efforts by those suffering, and who themselves risk their lives by documenting all that those victims want shown to the world.

“The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.”

As early as the first war photographers, governments have commissioned their work and sent them to the front as emissaries; those in power have both restricted the range of photographers and censored or banned their photographs, often appropriating them for misrepresentation. Newly-arising periodicals have used war photographs as selling points and marketing tools. Museum curators have presented these images as art, often to the dismay of spectators, who distrust the sincerity of the photographers or who wish a more private place to honor those suffering.

“[…] artists ‘make’ drawings and paintings while photographers ‘take’ photographs.”

Sontag reminds us of this expression of conventional thinking in the context of comparing Goya’s etchings of war with photographs. His captions work as moral counterpoints to provoke the viewer and comment on the difficulty of looking at what the etching compels us to see. However, captions for war photographs are presumed to be neutral, simply to inform the name, place, and date of the subject photographed, because the image is presumed to tell it all, to be the truth. Sontag takes issue with this conventional wisdom by explaining that a photograph is always a chosen image, with a chosen frame that not only includes, but excludes as well. Photographs have always been able to misrepresent.

“To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do, and pictures taken by photographers out in the field the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs.”

The clearest example in the book of this kind of photograph—and indeed of the singular power of photography—is the one taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War of a Republican soldier being shot down as the camera shoots his dying image. Sontag returns to this iconic photograph throughout her book as a case in point of the ways we value photography—as a physical trace of incontrovertible truth—and also of the ways photography is appropriated and disseminated. War images can become works of art and, even at the same time, vehicles for advertising. They can be re-contextualized and all but divorced from the commitments, risks, and purposes of their photographers. They can also glorify the photojournalists for posterity and cause viewers to remember the photograph more than what it represents.

“Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems 'aesthetic'; that is, too much like art.”

Sontag takes issue with the contemporary attitude described above. Photography’s dual powers—to document and to express artistically—need not be regarded separately; in fact, a photograph (or series of them) generally evokes or persuades beyond what is presented in the frame, and it is only recently and perhaps only with photographs of suffering that they appear immoral or distasteful if they allow attention to the medium itself. Such attention may well not distract from the misery within the frame but compel more compassion or thought in response to it.

“All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”

Sontag demonstrates how images are used to build and sustain ideologies, shared bodies of thoughts and beliefs. Photographs are not raw facts but representations; thus, members of groups—races, cultures, genders—choose and circulate images for their unifying value. Such “remembering” may often run so deep that the source is forgotten and only the image, in its stipulated meaning, is retained.

“Even in the era of cybermodels, what the mind feels like is still, as the ancients imagined it, an inner space—like a theatre—in which we picture, and it is these pictures that allow us to remember. The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs. This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding, and remembering.”

Images of concentration camps elicit memories of Nazi Germany; images of emaciated bodies bring the shock of African plights to mind. The problem is that we fix in our minds the cover photographs on Life magazine at the expense of inquiring what gave rise to those images, what they mean, and what can be done about them.

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do—but who is that 'we'? —and nothing 'they' can do either—and who are 'they’—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”

This observation arises as Sontag seeks to understand apathy in the midst of viewing the war in Bosnia. Such a feeling is just down the spectrum of feelings of helplessness and fear. When a war registers as unstoppable, viewers not only recoil from images of horror, but also become less responsive. Elsewhere, Sontag has pointed out that the Vietnam War was a counterpoint to this syndrome: an onslaught of images actually compelled Americans to act. She implies here that we need to consider, as we did then, who is the “we” and who is the “they,” and instead see them as interconnected.

“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 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 imagine—be linked to their 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.”

Sentimentality is not in contradiction with brutality but, in fact, often accompanies it. Worse, it can allow for a false link between spectators and sufferers. What looks like intimate bonding through images is really a disconnect, a mystification of power relations that are not reciprocal but imbalanced.

“No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.”

Sontag makes this proclamation in the context of reviewing her own observations set forth in her book On Photography, written thirty years earlier, demonstrating that she has a proclivity to reflect on history, and what has changed and what has not changed, in noting the onslaught of war coverage in the media. Wordsworth and Baudelaire may not have found images in their news, but they were dismayed at the extent to which it was flooded with gruesome reports of misery. Newer technology may fill our media (and therefore our lives) with images to replace words, but Sontag’s complaint three decades ago of a “non-stop feed” of images that no longer shocks but numbs is not the one she would voice today. Here, the proposition is to look more deeply, more critically, and to take more responsibility for representations of war.

“To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment…”

Sontag refers to the philosophies of French modernists such as Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard here, who claim that we live not in a world of reality but in one of illusions and simulations. The experience of war, like everything else, is mediated by images and, according to André Glucksmann, upon his visit to Sarajevo, for example, the war would be won or lost by the media.

Sontag shuns the idea of war as a spectacle. Not only does such thinking regard everyone as a spectator, but worse, it precludes real suffering in the world.

“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 rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers.”

Photographs are not simply objective traces of real persons and events, but also subjective choices of content, angle, distance, composition, and lighting. Even so, these choices cannot teach us but only, at best, stress the need to inquire further about our possible relations to the brutality we behold, to lead us to consider regimes of power in which we might be participants.

“There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: ‘Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.’”

Here, Sontag is distinguishing not between sitting back (in one’s living room watching the news on TV or tapping it on the small screen of a phone), safely behind a mediating device, and being up close, actually participating in the misery. Instead, she is differentiating passive from active spectatorship. Just watching, even at the sidelines or on-site, is not enough; it is not processing our perceptions so as to interpret them, to beg the reasons why suffering is happening, and understand who or what causes it.