Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. (Hamish Hamilton, 2003). 0241142075.
Review: Jeremy Harding “Humanitarian Art”. LRB 2003.08.21
Photographs are accessories to the act of remembering. “What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important… with the pictures that lock the story in out minds.”
“To designate a hell is not … to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell…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.” To look at a photograph is to pay attention. And attention, however compromised, is better than indifference or ignorance.
“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 kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.”
“Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens and cannot possibly encompass all the reality of a people’s agony, they still perform an immensely positive function. The images says: keep these events in your memory.”
“To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”
[Harding] “To universalize is both desirable and dangerous, then. Desirable because it is a way of unpacking atrocities committed in the name of this and that, in order to insist that they are first and foremost atrocities. Dangerous because it disguises or obfuscates problems of power.”
“If photographs of devastation in Spain ‘could only stimulate the repudiation of was in the mind of one observer, in another ‘surely they could foster greater militancy on behalf of the Republic.'”
“All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.”
“The photograph is itself neutral, neither for nor against any political position; a statement of witness, about what people do to each other.”
“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.” But in Sontag’s view this is to charge the photographs with crimes they have not committed.
According to David Levi Strauss’ perspective “photographs can get the viewer started on all kinds of work – visual, intellectual and intuitive – and that a lot of it is richer than the term ‘moral’ can encompass, at least in first draft. But photographs have a way of dragging what is said of them into the moral register, especially when it comes to politics.”
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