Regarding the Pain of Others

It was a challenge to get through it due to the content. Yet, well written and informative.

muy conmovedor! La escritora habla sobre su experiencia en la guerra de Sarajevo.

I was expecting something more...substantially more. I felt like it only scratched the surface of what was a really great topic.

It pains me reading it...its style is nothing but to-the-point. My apologies for being shallow in regarding such a famed piece of work shallow. Why not take a picture of me reading this book and make it its cover.

“But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape.” Susan Sontag has always been interested in the relationship between war and photography; here she continues her excavation of images of suffering, and quarrels with ideas first explored in her earlier, famous work, “On Photography”. She questions the widely popular view that within our culture of...more

“But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape.” Susan Sontag has always been interested in the relationship between war and photography; here she continues her excavation of images of suffering, and quarrels with ideas first explored in her earlier, famous work, “On Photography”. She questions the widely popular view that within our culture of spectatorship“…as much as they create sympathy…photographs shrivel sympathy…” She writes about the dual powers of photography—to create documents and create works of art. She struggles with the contradiction of discovering and documenting images of beauty within the context of horrific atrocities. Although artful photography (of destruction and despair) presents a moral challenge, Sontag believes that photographs continue to be an important form of evidence, that contact with these images serves to enlarge us as human beings. She writes: “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…No one after a certain age has the right to this degree of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance or amnesia.” The difficulty, as always, is that seeing and watching remain simply seeing and watching, no matter how close up or faraway you are. Near the end of the book she writes: “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.” It’s true that repeated exposure to horrific images, however beautiful (or troubling? or careless? or manipulative?) they may be, might have diminishing impact. On the other hand, many people are moved to act when they see certain types of photographs. Sontag refers to many specific images (drawings, paintings and photography—everything from Goya to Jeff Wall) in this book, though none are actually pictured alongside the text. Her discussion of the images made me want to seek them out, but I wonder if I will ever do that—seek them, out of my own free will? This in itself touches upon the same combination of laziness and fear that is more problematic than any photograph or news story might be. Despite it’s brevity (125 pages), this book will weigh heavily on anyone who reads it.   hide

A little dry for my taste in any book not about history, but really interesting. And it was short!

I think her ending basically sums up the whole endeavor: "We, don't understand. We don't get it. We can't imagine what it was like...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." Although this makes for good...more

I think her ending basically sums up the whole endeavor: "We, don't understand. We don't get it. We can't imagine what it was like...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." Although this makes for good subway-reading (don't have to focus much), there still seems to be not much original thought and reads like some smart blog entries (apart from one or two sections which could have gone further, specifically, the one where she compares the inadequate story told by an image and those told via other mediums).   hide

Sontag, well known for a number of reasons, is also was a leading critic of photography, my chosen profession. This book displays her knowledge of the medium while she philosophically asks the important quesiton: has photography, in recording the pain and suffering in the world, helped or hurt its cause? While it has enabled everyone to see the starvation in Africa and the brutality of war, it...more

Sontag, well known for a number of reasons, is also was a leading critic of photography, my chosen profession. This book displays her knowledge of the medium while she philosophically asks the important quesiton: has photography, in recording the pain and suffering in the world, helped or hurt its cause? While it has enabled everyone to see the starvation in Africa and the brutality of war, it has also made us desensitized. Sontag explores this dichotomy in this must read for any thinker or photojournalist.   hide

Changed my life