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Devant la douleur des autres
Réflexion sur la représentation photographique de la souffrance humaine. L'objectivité de la photographie est étudiée, l'art allant à l'encontre du réel. D'autre part, la perception du public est évoquée : l'exposition répétée aux images rend insensible ou l'impuissance suscitée dégoûte du message. La question du voyeurisme se pose aussi, chaque image pouvant susciter une excitation malsaine.
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138 pages, Paperback
First published January 7, 2003
1748 people are currently reading
56866 people want to read
About the author
Susan Sontag
230 books5,494 followersSusan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.
Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.
Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.
Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.
A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.
Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.
Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.
Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.
Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.
Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.
Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.
A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.
Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.
Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.
Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 2,196 reviews
May 4, 2014
I’ve always thought that one of the things it would be fairly reasonable to have written on my headstone would be, “He often missed the obvious”. I was saying to people at work the other day that there was a part of this book where I thought, “god, how did I get to be 50 and never think of this before?” It was the bit where she talks about the holocaust and holocaust museums and then questions why America doesn’t have a museum to the victims of slavery – you know, those victims are still walking about amongst us to the extent that black American disadvantage is a continuing manifestation of that history and the subsequent imposed ways of thinking caused by that history. Why is there no real museum dedicated to the holocaust that occurred to the Australian Aboriginals? We have a holocaust museum here in Melbourne too. Her discussion of the nature of ‘remembering’ is probably worth the effort in reading the book.
Not that this book requires much effort – if there is one thing you can say for Sontag it is that she is a remarkably clear writer and thinker.
In many ways this book is Sontag coming back to themes she discusses in On Photography and not always coming to the same conclusions. There is a really nice part of the book where she discusses drawings of the sufferings of war done by Goya where he writes under them captions that say things like, “Look, this actually happened, I'm not making this up.” The point being, in part, that we don’t expect to need to say things like that under a photograph. We might question whether it is a truly representative photograph, but we generally don’t question whether it is true. We still expect today that what we see photographed is a manifestation of the light that struck the lens. She talks about the faking of photographs, particularly war photographs – rearranging bodies or the staging of events after the event to make it look more like we think it ‘ought’ to have looked – but even then, even as a staged event, we still think of photography as telling a kind of truth even if it is one that needs to be explained and qualified.
Over the last month or so there has been an exhibition at the State Library of Victoria called Rome: Piranesi's vision. Piranesi did scenes of Rome and also visions of Ancient Rome – reconstructions in the shape of maps as well as imaginative drawings. And over the last month or so I’ve attended a couple of lectures on his images. Now, I’d always just thought that if someone was going to do views of a city that, you know, they would sit down somewhere and draw what they saw in front of them. I can be naive like that. But actually, what Piranesi did was to ‘improve’ Rome. Not just making buildings look better – but shifting them so that they would be next to other buildings and in also not being too concerned if he missed a couple of windows here or some doors there. He was going for pretty, rather than accuracy. I was so surprised at this, it is hard to say. I had always just assumed that these drawings would be ‘accurate’ – photograph accurate. I also thought the maps, even maps of places that didn't exist anymore, would also strive for a kind of accuracy too, but these spent more time trying to be pretty too, despite knowingly ignoring stuff. Often photographs, particularly war photographs, need to be approached in much the same way that Piranesi’s visions of Rome need to be approached.
We look at images of the holocaust and a large part of the point of that is ‘to remember’ – except, the holocaust occurred before most of us were born – so the verb, ‘to remember’ probably isn’t quite the right one. Rather, the point of looking at these images isn’t to remember, but to learn and understand with the hope that we learn that this should never happen again. Except, it does happen again. If there is one thing that the photographic archive of the 20th century proves time and again it is that people are all too able to commit the most god-awful atrocities, often with a kind of gleeful abandon. I can’t remember who said it, possibly Zizek, that America is the oddest place, atrocity after atrocity occurs there (think of school shootings) and somehow after each new atrocity people can still say, in all seriousness, that the country has just ‘lost its innocence’. We need to get over this idea that we can still be ‘innocent’ – this is one of the things that Sontag says we can learn from looking at images of past atrocities.
I think this is a particularly important book to read this year, preferably before August. Soon we are going to go through an endless reliving of World War One. And you know that we humans much prefer the romance of war to its horrors. That we even make the horrors seems somehow romantic. Before you get swept away with how much fun war is, perhaps learning to think about the moral and ethical questions that lie at the heart of looking at images of the pain of others is a useful exercise. For that reason this book is a useful place to start.
Not that this book requires much effort – if there is one thing you can say for Sontag it is that she is a remarkably clear writer and thinker.
In many ways this book is Sontag coming back to themes she discusses in On Photography and not always coming to the same conclusions. There is a really nice part of the book where she discusses drawings of the sufferings of war done by Goya where he writes under them captions that say things like, “Look, this actually happened, I'm not making this up.” The point being, in part, that we don’t expect to need to say things like that under a photograph. We might question whether it is a truly representative photograph, but we generally don’t question whether it is true. We still expect today that what we see photographed is a manifestation of the light that struck the lens. She talks about the faking of photographs, particularly war photographs – rearranging bodies or the staging of events after the event to make it look more like we think it ‘ought’ to have looked – but even then, even as a staged event, we still think of photography as telling a kind of truth even if it is one that needs to be explained and qualified.
Over the last month or so there has been an exhibition at the State Library of Victoria called Rome: Piranesi's vision. Piranesi did scenes of Rome and also visions of Ancient Rome – reconstructions in the shape of maps as well as imaginative drawings. And over the last month or so I’ve attended a couple of lectures on his images. Now, I’d always just thought that if someone was going to do views of a city that, you know, they would sit down somewhere and draw what they saw in front of them. I can be naive like that. But actually, what Piranesi did was to ‘improve’ Rome. Not just making buildings look better – but shifting them so that they would be next to other buildings and in also not being too concerned if he missed a couple of windows here or some doors there. He was going for pretty, rather than accuracy. I was so surprised at this, it is hard to say. I had always just assumed that these drawings would be ‘accurate’ – photograph accurate. I also thought the maps, even maps of places that didn't exist anymore, would also strive for a kind of accuracy too, but these spent more time trying to be pretty too, despite knowingly ignoring stuff. Often photographs, particularly war photographs, need to be approached in much the same way that Piranesi’s visions of Rome need to be approached.
We look at images of the holocaust and a large part of the point of that is ‘to remember’ – except, the holocaust occurred before most of us were born – so the verb, ‘to remember’ probably isn’t quite the right one. Rather, the point of looking at these images isn’t to remember, but to learn and understand with the hope that we learn that this should never happen again. Except, it does happen again. If there is one thing that the photographic archive of the 20th century proves time and again it is that people are all too able to commit the most god-awful atrocities, often with a kind of gleeful abandon. I can’t remember who said it, possibly Zizek, that America is the oddest place, atrocity after atrocity occurs there (think of school shootings) and somehow after each new atrocity people can still say, in all seriousness, that the country has just ‘lost its innocence’. We need to get over this idea that we can still be ‘innocent’ – this is one of the things that Sontag says we can learn from looking at images of past atrocities.
I think this is a particularly important book to read this year, preferably before August. Soon we are going to go through an endless reliving of World War One. And you know that we humans much prefer the romance of war to its horrors. That we even make the horrors seems somehow romantic. Before you get swept away with how much fun war is, perhaps learning to think about the moral and ethical questions that lie at the heart of looking at images of the pain of others is a useful exercise. For that reason this book is a useful place to start.
December 26, 2020
خواندن کتاب تماشای رنج دیگران از خانم سوزان سانتاگ ، تجربه ای چالش برانگیزی بود ، در حقیقت خانم سانتاگ علاوه بر معرفی عکسهای مهم و تاریخ ساز ، عکاس ، محل گرفتن عکس سوال های مهمی را نیز مطرح می کند : این که مثلا انتشار یک عکس خشن خود می تواند عاملی بر ترویج خشونت باشد ؟ آیا دیدن زیاد عکسهای خشن ( مانند چیزی که امروزه در اخبار جهان می بینیم و می شنویم ) می تواند خشونت را امری عادی کند ؟
خانم سانتاگ عکسهای خیلی معروفی را در کتاب بررسی می کند : از جمله سربازی که در جنگ داخلی اسپانیا تیر می خورد و در حال حرکت نقش زمین می شود . یا اعدام آن ویت کنگ معروف با صورتی مچاله شده از درد و وحشت توسط نگویک وان لون ، رییس پلیس سایگون . که این عکس به نوبه خود تاریخ ساز شد و شاید باعث تغییر جهت جنگ و تظاهرات در آمریکا بر علیه جنگ ویتنام شد .
کتاب یک عکس شاهکار هم روی جلد دارد ، افرادی که توسط خمرهای سرخ در کامبوج در لیست اعدام قرار دارند وبه زودی اعدام خواهند شد ، اضطراب این افراد و ترس و مرگ در راه به راحتی و روشنی از چشمهای آنان پیداست .
اما در سالهای اخیر و با شروع جنگ های داخلی خونین در خاورمیانه و شمال آفریقا ، عکاسی از مهاجرین و پناهندگان چه انهایی که به اروپا رسیده اند و چه آنهایی که جان خود یا عزیزان خود را در دریای بی پایان از دست داده اند رواج پیدا کرده ، معروفترین آنها شاید آیلان کودک سوریه ای باشد که با صورت بر ساحلی در ترکیه افتاده و جان خود را از دست داده است ( عکس که توسط عکاسی تُرک گرفته شده به راحتی در اینترنت قابل پیدا شدن است ) . تصویربدن آیلان باعث ایجاد جریانی قوی به نفع پناهندگان در اروپا و در سیاستمداران اروپایی به خصوص خانم مرکل شد .
شاید میلیونها پناهنده سوری که هم اکنون در اروپا زندگی می کنند ، بقای خود را در اروپا تا حدی مدیون آیلان کوچک و اثرگذاری او بر قلبهای مردم در سرتاسر جهان باشند .
خانم سانتاگ عکسهای خیلی معروفی را در کتاب بررسی می کند : از جمله سربازی که در جنگ داخلی اسپانیا تیر می خورد و در حال حرکت نقش زمین می شود . یا اعدام آن ویت کنگ معروف با صورتی مچاله شده از درد و وحشت توسط نگویک وان لون ، رییس پلیس سایگون . که این عکس به نوبه خود تاریخ ساز شد و شاید باعث تغییر جهت جنگ و تظاهرات در آمریکا بر علیه جنگ ویتنام شد .
کتاب یک عکس شاهکار هم روی جلد دارد ، افرادی که توسط خمرهای سرخ در کامبوج در لیست اعدام قرار دارند وبه زودی اعدام خواهند شد ، اضطراب این افراد و ترس و مرگ در راه به راحتی و روشنی از چشمهای آنان پیداست .
اما در سالهای اخیر و با شروع جنگ های داخلی خونین در خاورمیانه و شمال آفریقا ، عکاسی از مهاجرین و پناهندگان چه انهایی که به اروپا رسیده اند و چه آنهایی که جان خود یا عزیزان خود را در دریای بی پایان از دست داده اند رواج پیدا کرده ، معروفترین آنها شاید آیلان کودک سوریه ای باشد که با صورت بر ساحلی در ترکیه افتاده و جان خود را از دست داده است ( عکس که توسط عکاسی تُرک گرفته شده به راحتی در اینترنت قابل پیدا شدن است ) . تصویربدن آیلان باعث ایجاد جریانی قوی به نفع پناهندگان در اروپا و در سیاستمداران اروپایی به خصوص خانم مرکل شد .
شاید میلیونها پناهنده سوری که هم اکنون در اروپا زندگی می کنند ، بقای خود را در اروپا تا حدی مدیون آیلان کوچک و اثرگذاری او بر قلبهای مردم در سرتاسر جهان باشند .
August 5, 2021
کتاب کم حجمی بود در مورد عکاسی از صحنههای جنگ و رنج و مصائب مردم، آیا یک عکس میتواند تمام و کمال آنچه که افراد موجود در عکس را رنج داده به درستی روایت کند و به بیننده منتقل کند؟ این چیزی است که سانتاگ با بررسی عکسهای گوناگون مربوط به جنگها و دورههای مختلف، به چالش کشیده و بررسی کرده است.
April 30, 2024
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
The main focus of this long essay is war photography.
At the beginning of the book Sontag cites the question Virginia Woolf posed in her Three Guineas:
"How in your opinion are we to prevent war?"
Sontag then proceeds to argue the importance of photography, analyzing the different ways photographs have been used in wartime as instruments to elicit sympathy and commiseration or means of propagating pro or anti war sentiments.
Nonstop imagery (televisions, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact way for memorizing it. No object is more equated with memory than the camera image. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
The main focus of this long essay is war photography.
At the beginning of the book Sontag cites the question Virginia Woolf posed in her Three Guineas:
"How in your opinion are we to prevent war?"
Sontag then proceeds to argue the importance of photography, analyzing the different ways photographs have been used in wartime as instruments to elicit sympathy and commiseration or means of propagating pro or anti war sentiments.
Nonstop imagery (televisions, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact way for memorizing it. No object is more equated with memory than the camera image. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
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February 17, 2024Не хвалилася, що переклала для IST Publishing «Спостереження за болем інших» Сʼюзен Зонтаґ (і страшенно тішилася можливості попрацювати з цим текстом; передзамовити можна тут). Це довгий есей про те, що ж ми робимо, коли дивимося на фотографії вчиненого над іншими насильства, і всі етичні колізії, пов'язані з цією дією.
Зараз ми всі стикаємося з величезною кількістю страшних фотографій мертвих тіл, розчахнутих будинків, зруйнованих пейзажів, у яких уже майже не вгадуються сліди життя. Очевидно, про режими функціонування цих зображень ми всі зараз багато думаємо (що варто показувати? за яких обставин? який баланс між тим, щоб донести знання, і тим, щоб не травмувати інших? чи не потрапляємо ми, інформуючи західну публіку про вчинені росіянами злочини, в пастку того, що конкретика злочинів забудеться й перетвориться на розмите "а, в Україні завжди когось убивають, ерго, не варто перейматися"? і так далі, і таке інше). Зараз, перекладаючи цю книжку, я дивувалася, наскільки коло моїх запитань до страшних фото зумовлене цією книжкою - читала її колись давно й навіть не уявляла, наскільки вона мені сформувала цю ментальну архітектуру. Сподіваюся, якщо ви її ще не читали, то вам вона також буде цікавою і корисною.
Про що в ній можна прочитати?
* Наприклад, про те, в яких випадках фото жертв з міркувань пристойності не показують крупним планом, а в яких показують. Спойлер: показують здебільшого у випадку постколоніальних країн (і мене тривожить, що ми потрапляємо в цю категорію, де жертва - об'єкт, який можна виставляти на огляд, не переймаючись міркуваннями пристойності і моралі). Цитата:
* Наприклад, про те, що межа між співчуттям і співучастю в злочинах може виявитися тонкою. Цитата:
* Взагалі, про історію візуального документування страждань:
І так далі, і таке інше. Дуже люблю і ціную цей текст.
Зараз ми всі стикаємося з величезною кількістю страшних фотографій мертвих тіл, розчахнутих будинків, зруйнованих пейзажів, у яких уже майже не вгадуються сліди життя. Очевидно, про режими функціонування цих зображень ми всі зараз багато думаємо (що варто показувати? за яких обставин? який баланс між тим, щоб донести знання, і тим, щоб не травмувати інших? чи не потрапляємо ми, інформуючи західну публіку про вчинені росіянами злочини, в пастку того, що конкретика злочинів забудеться й перетвориться на розмите "а, в Україні завжди когось убивають, ерго, не варто перейматися"? і так далі, і таке інше). Зараз, перекладаючи цю книжку, я дивувалася, наскільки коло моїх запитань до страшних фото зумовлене цією книжкою - читала її колись давно й навіть не уявляла, наскільки вона мені сформувала цю ментальну архітектуру. Сподіваюся, якщо ви її ще не читали, то вам вона також буде цікавою і корисною.
Про що в ній можна прочитати?
* Наприклад, про те, в яких випадках фото жертв з міркувань пристойності не показують крупним планом, а в яких показують. Спойлер: показують здебільшого у випадку постколоніальних країн (і мене тривожить, що ми потрапляємо в цю категорію, де жертва - об'єкт, який можна виставляти на огляд, не переймаючись міркуваннями пристойності і моралі). Цитата:
"Що віддаленіше й екзотичніше місце, то ймовірніше нам показуватимуть загиблих і помираючих крупним планом, неприкрито. Таким чином постколоніальна Африка, якщо винести за дужки її звабливу музику, існує у свідомості широкого загалу заможного світу передовсім як процесія незабутніх фото жертв із широко розплющеними очима, починаючи з голоду в Біафрі під кінець 1960-х до вцілілих у геноциді руандійських тутсі 1994 року, що забрав майже мільйон життів, а за кілька років по тому почали надходити фото дітей і дорослих з відрубаними кінцівками під час масового терору, який провадив Об’єднаний революційний фронт — повстанці у Сьєрра-Леоне. (Найновіший додаток до цієї серії — фотографії з поселень корінних народів, де цілі родини вимирають від СНІДу.) Повідомлення у цих видовиськ подвійне. Вони демонструють обурливе і несправедливе стра��дання, яке потрібно припинити. І водночас підтверджують, що таке там трапляється. Повсюдність таких фотографій і жахів хоч-не-хоч підживлює віру в неминучість трагедій у тих темних і відсталих, тобто бідних частинах світу. ... Загалом, жахливо понівечені тіла на опублікованих фотографіях зазвичай походять з Азії чи Африки. Цей журналістський звичай — спадок багатосотлітньої практики виставляти на огляд екзотичних, тобто колонізованих людей: африканців і мешканців далеких азіатських країн виставляли, як тварин у зоопарку, на етнологічних виставках у Лондоні, Парижі й інших європейських столицях від XVI до початку ХХ століття. ... Виставляючи на огляд фотографії насильства, заподіяного людям з темнішою шкірою в екзотичних країнах, і вмить забувши про міркування, які не дозволяють нам так само виставляти фотографії жертв насильства спосеред нашого населення, ми продовжуємо цю традицію"
* Наприклад, про те, що межа між співчуттям і співучастю в злочинах може виявитися тонкою. Цитата:
"Доки ми співчуваємо, нам здається, що ми не співучасники того, що заподіює страждання. Наше співчуття декларує, що ми невинні, але й безсилі щось змінити.
Відкласти співчуття до тих, хто страждає від війни і вбивчої політики, на користь роздумів про місце наших привілеїв на тій самій мапі, що й їхнє страждання, і можливий зв’язок між нашими привілеями і тими бідами (якого ми, можливо, уявляти не хочемо) — так, як багатство одних може передбачати злидні інших — це завдання, до якого болючі і зворушливі зображення дають тільки перший поштовх".
* Взагалі, про історію візуального документування страждань:
"Практика зображати жахливі страждання як те, що глядач повинен засудити, а по змозі й зупинити, входить в історію зображень у зв’язку з однією конкретною темою: страждання цивільного населення від рук переможної армії, яка плюндрує завойовані землі".
І так далі, і таке інше. Дуже люблю і ціную цей текст.
March 23, 2019
Sontag's second book on photography, and like the first back in 1977 this contains zero photographs. Words are Sontag's antidote to strong images, she is only really concerned with photography's prurient intrusiveness, there dislocation of reality, actual photographs are of less interest to her, and are mentioned, in stern verbal paraphrase, only to be reproved for their untrustworthiness. Sontag retells the familiar stories about photographs that sanitise or falsify the conflict they are supposed to be documenting, and the media have trained our eyes only too well to instinctively transform an intolerable, unintelligible reality into fiction. In our culture of always being the spectator, have we simply lost the power to be shocked?
The pain of others, the victims of famine and massacre are always people we don't know, it titillates us, so long as it is kept at a reasonably safe distance. Sontag blames the eyes indiscriminate lust, claiming the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. She also argues that images of war should solely belong in newspapers surrounded by words, rather than in magazines, which juxtapose them with glossy advertising images, and be kept out of museums and galleries. I found this an interesting and thought-provoking book, especially the part on the famous war photographer Robert Capa, and his iconic photograph of the Spanish Civil War depicting a Republican soldier at the very instant he is killed by enemy fire. Some evidence suggests that this universally recognized photo was almost certainly staged and may have been recorded a training exercise.
I'm not convinced by everything Sontag has to say, she constantly fires devastating questions but her evidence is sometimes sketchy. Still, this is no doubt another powerful and important piece of writing.
The pain of others, the victims of famine and massacre are always people we don't know, it titillates us, so long as it is kept at a reasonably safe distance. Sontag blames the eyes indiscriminate lust, claiming the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. She also argues that images of war should solely belong in newspapers surrounded by words, rather than in magazines, which juxtapose them with glossy advertising images, and be kept out of museums and galleries. I found this an interesting and thought-provoking book, especially the part on the famous war photographer Robert Capa, and his iconic photograph of the Spanish Civil War depicting a Republican soldier at the very instant he is killed by enemy fire. Some evidence suggests that this universally recognized photo was almost certainly staged and may have been recorded a training exercise.
I'm not convinced by everything Sontag has to say, she constantly fires devastating questions but her evidence is sometimes sketchy. Still, this is no doubt another powerful and important piece of writing.
October 22, 2016
Sometimes back I watched the movie “The Bang-Bang Club” based upon the lives of a group of photojournalists who went by that name in Johannesburg in the mid 80s. These photojournalists mostly clicked photographs of the victims of apartheid or of the violence perpetrated by clashes between different black ethnic groups in South Africa. The movie also focused on the distress which these journalists went through after or while clicking the photographs. One of the journalists of the club, Kevin Carter (played by Taylor Kitsch in the movie), had won a Pulitzer for his famous photograph depicting a starving child and a vulture in famine hit Sudan in 1993. The picture was clicked at such an angle that it seemed that the vulture was waiting for a chance to pounce upon the poor child. There was a huge controversy when this picture was first published and most readers condemned Kevin for a lack of empathy.
The St. Petersburg Times wrote:
“The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.”
After three months of his winning the Pulitzer, Kevin committed suicide.
For a few days I was haunted by the movie but eventually I forgot about it. And it wasn’t until I read Regarding the Pain of Others by Sontag that I remembered the movie and my experience of watching and subsequently, forgetting it. As I read the work, I questioned my response to the movie and also to the deluge of images of pain sweeping the social media on the internet. What do I see when I see those images, what do I feel? Do these images, in any way, affect the way we respond to tragedies, to wars, to life?
In this work, Sontag presents a Critique on the images of suffering of others. She mulls over the motives of photographers engaged in capturing images (specifically) of war, calling them specialized tourists, citing various examples of such photographs where the sole purpose of photographer was to educe a certain response even if that meant careful selection and preparation of the scene prior to shot in war hit places. The response, mostly shock according to her, has been the stimulus that leads to the fixation of people for such photos.
She criticizes Roger Fenton’s very famous photograph from Crimean war “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”, calling it as a portrait of absence, of death without the dead, a road swamped with rocks and cannonballs which didn’t really need to be staged. But her criticism doesn’t even spare us, the spectators of such photographs who are more disappointed than surprised at discovering that many of the famous war photos appear to have been staged.
Her sarcastic voice is quite discernible while accepting the inevitable reach of twenty four hours news channel on TV who make use of images featuring violence just for the sake of increasing TRP’s.
Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called "news," features conflict and violence— "If it bleeds, it leads" runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows——to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.
She is concerned about the various responses that such photographs may generate:
“In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people's pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.”
When we really think of it, it is true that this is the kind of response evoked in our minds when we see images of suffering. Most of the times it is this awareness that terrible things happen, sometimes it may be a sense of relief (in the subconscious) for being spared of the suffering, a guilt laden respite we may not wish to admit to our conscious mind even. Sometimes it may be just a curiosity to witness the limit to which humans can debase themselves. Sontag says:
Edmund Burke observed that people like to look at images of suffering. "I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others," he wrote in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). "There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity."
The reign of media like facebook and twitter has sadly made it more evident. The manner in which such images appear and are shared and viewed, confirms that other people’s pains and miseries fascinate us and though sometimes the response might be compassion or anger or a bemused awareness, it is bothering to think that a relentless exposure may lead to feelings of indifference, that with such proximity the images of suffering of others may eventually become normal for the likes of us, for ‘us’ who have never actually experienced that pain which extreme tragedies and wars bring about, for ‘us’ who can never really understand such suffering.
The St. Petersburg Times wrote:
“The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.”
After three months of his winning the Pulitzer, Kevin committed suicide.
For a few days I was haunted by the movie but eventually I forgot about it. And it wasn’t until I read Regarding the Pain of Others by Sontag that I remembered the movie and my experience of watching and subsequently, forgetting it. As I read the work, I questioned my response to the movie and also to the deluge of images of pain sweeping the social media on the internet. What do I see when I see those images, what do I feel? Do these images, in any way, affect the way we respond to tragedies, to wars, to life?
In this work, Sontag presents a Critique on the images of suffering of others. She mulls over the motives of photographers engaged in capturing images (specifically) of war, calling them specialized tourists, citing various examples of such photographs where the sole purpose of photographer was to educe a certain response even if that meant careful selection and preparation of the scene prior to shot in war hit places. The response, mostly shock according to her, has been the stimulus that leads to the fixation of people for such photos.
She criticizes Roger Fenton’s very famous photograph from Crimean war “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”, calling it as a portrait of absence, of death without the dead, a road swamped with rocks and cannonballs which didn’t really need to be staged. But her criticism doesn’t even spare us, the spectators of such photographs who are more disappointed than surprised at discovering that many of the famous war photos appear to have been staged.
Her sarcastic voice is quite discernible while accepting the inevitable reach of twenty four hours news channel on TV who make use of images featuring violence just for the sake of increasing TRP’s.
Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called "news," features conflict and violence— "If it bleeds, it leads" runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows——to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.
She is concerned about the various responses that such photographs may generate:
“In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people's pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.”
When we really think of it, it is true that this is the kind of response evoked in our minds when we see images of suffering. Most of the times it is this awareness that terrible things happen, sometimes it may be a sense of relief (in the subconscious) for being spared of the suffering, a guilt laden respite we may not wish to admit to our conscious mind even. Sometimes it may be just a curiosity to witness the limit to which humans can debase themselves. Sontag says:
Edmund Burke observed that people like to look at images of suffering. "I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others," he wrote in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). "There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity."
The reign of media like facebook and twitter has sadly made it more evident. The manner in which such images appear and are shared and viewed, confirms that other people’s pains and miseries fascinate us and though sometimes the response might be compassion or anger or a bemused awareness, it is bothering to think that a relentless exposure may lead to feelings of indifference, that with such proximity the images of suffering of others may eventually become normal for the likes of us, for ‘us’ who have never actually experienced that pain which extreme tragedies and wars bring about, for ‘us’ who can never really understand such suffering.
Read
May 23, 2018A bracingly intelligent look at the assumptions we make about images of suffering (paintings, war photography, TV reporting, etc.). This is one of those that I’m tempted to “review” by just quoting the whole damn book:
“What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past…appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed.”
“We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and death, and those being photographed to be unaware of the camera, ‘off guard.’”
“The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying….for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees.”
“Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.”
“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”
“Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.”
I could go on and on. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship with Sontag’s work.
“What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past…appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed.”
“We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and death, and those being photographed to be unaware of the camera, ‘off guard.’”
“The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying….for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees.”
“Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.”
“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”
“Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.”
I could go on and on. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship with Sontag’s work.
February 16, 2020
An examination of images of war and how those that view these images react to them. Concise, Sontag writes of the history of war photography and earlier depictions of war through paintings, and the purpose of these images, for the victims of war, the perpetrators, as well as those that view them.
“The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images”
A fact that many can confirm. Although I did experience war myself at some point in my life, it was early enough that I have no surviving memories from the period and so I too know of war mainly from the images that I’ve seen on the television about war. Sontag writes about how these pictures come to the viewers, the intent behind those that capture these images being less important than the response from the viewers. Also examining what repeated exposure of tragic events does to those that repeatedly view them, the tragic events are commemorated and those that are not.
“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.”
This was a fantastic read, the kind that perfectly articulates snatches of thoughts that you couldn’t have shaped into the ideas presented to you while informing you and jolting you to think beyond what you would typically of war and its representation
“The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images”
A fact that many can confirm. Although I did experience war myself at some point in my life, it was early enough that I have no surviving memories from the period and so I too know of war mainly from the images that I’ve seen on the television about war. Sontag writes about how these pictures come to the viewers, the intent behind those that capture these images being less important than the response from the viewers. Also examining what repeated exposure of tragic events does to those that repeatedly view them, the tragic events are commemorated and those that are not.
“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.”
This was a fantastic read, the kind that perfectly articulates snatches of thoughts that you couldn’t have shaped into the ideas presented to you while informing you and jolting you to think beyond what you would typically of war and its representation
December 7, 2020
ایدهها و نکات جالبی داشت اما این ایدههای جالب خیلی زیاد نبودن. گاهی بسیار خستهکننده میشد و به هر ضرب و زوری بود تمومش کردم. خوندنش اتفاق بدی نیست، چون حرفهای جالبی هم داره، ولی حرفهای جالبش به نظرم کم بود و همین باعث میشد وقتی داره حرفهای ناجالب میزنه خسته شی. به هر حال هیچ چیز کامل نیست.
February 3, 2022
3.5
کتاب بحث جالبی رو مطرح میکنه مبنی بر اینکه انسان اساسا علاقهمند به تماشای درد و رنجه. اونقدر که ادعا میکنه عطشی که برای نمایش بدنهای ستمدیده وجود داره به اندازه بدنهای برهنه قویه و میاد اشاراتی میکنه که چطور طی قرون متمادی تصور و تصویرسازی جهنم هر دو مشخصه از لذتهای اصلی رو ارضا میکردن. یا چطور بخش قابل توجهی از هنر به مفهوم رنج و حتی شکنجه کردن تخصیص پیدا کرده. البته نقش مذاهب رو نباید در این میان نادیده گرفت که البته خودش میتونه و احتمالا تا حد زیادی متاثر از همین میل ذاتی انسان شده. بگذریم.
این میل رو امروز میشه در صنعت فیلم و سرگرمیهای ژانر خشونت و یا وحشت دنبال کرد که خوب عدهای به طور عیان این تمایل رو از خودشون بروز میدن. اما در مورد افراد متینتر (!)، کافیه راهبندان و ترافیکی که ناشی از توقف سماجتآمیز خودروها و عابران متعدد، برای دیدن بدن متلاشی و صورت خونین فرد تصادف کرده هست، رو به یاد بیاریم. همه ما، به نوعی خواسته یا ناخواسته چشمچرانیم. این حقیقته که نوعی لذت خاموش در تماشای رنج دیگران در درون انسان وجود داره
متاسفانه بحث سونتاگ در این کتاب خیلی پراکنده است و همین باعث میشه لذت خوندن کتاب بسیار منقطع باشه. چون دائما بین جنبههای مختلف "نمایش و مشاهده تصاویر جنگ" پرش میکنه. کتاب عنوان میکنه که به طور کلی به موضوع نمایش تصاویر جنگی میشه به دو شکل نگاه کرد
• یکی اینه نمایش عکسها خوبه، چون باعث میشن جنگها فراموش نشن و همواره به یاد آورده بشن
• یکی دیگه اینکه نمایش عکسها بده، چون جهان رو با عکس اشباع میکنه و به تدریج مردم بیتفاوت و پوستکلفت میشن
سونتاگ بحث میکنه که مشکل تفکر دوم، در عکاسی از جنگها و مصائب انسانها نیست. بلکه در مدیایی هست که اونها رو نمایش میده. در این راستا توضیح میده که چطور تلویزیون عذاب جنگ رو به ابتذال میکشونه. چون موجودیت تلویزیون بر تعویض سریع کانالها استواره. هر چیزی که شما رو ملول و کسل کنه در آنی میتونه با چیزی مفرح و حتی مبتذل جایگزین بشه. و این مدیای نمایش تصاویر هست که باید محکوم بشه نه عکاسی از مصائب بشر. امروز عینا همین استدلال رو میتونیم در مورد شبکههای مجازی و تا حدی سایتهای اینترنتی هم عنوان کنیم. حس ترحم انسان به واسطه سواستفاده بیحد و حصر از تکنولوژی در حال کرخ شدنه
از طرف دیگه، سونتاگ گریزی میزنه به این موضوع جالب که به خاطر اشتهای همیشگی انسان به تصاویر دلخراش، خواهناخواه حضور سایه پلید تجارت تثبیت میشه. اما متاسفانه در این باب خیلی ورود نمیکنه. یا مثلا در جای دیگهای، سونتاگ روی حسی که در انسان در موقع دیدن عکس مصائب مردمان جنگزده به وجود میاد تمرکز میکنه. اینکه عمدتا این حس، چیزی شبیه دلسوزی سادهلوحانه است مبتنی بر اینکه "کاری از دست من برنمیاد". سونتاگ بحث میکنه که این حسی نادرست و به نوعی نابود کننده اون حس ترحمی هست که باید آگاهانه در انسان برانگیخته بشه. بحث جالبیه اما متاسفانه باز چندان این ترحم آگاهانه رو تشریح نمیکنه و خیلی سریع از روش عبور میکنه.
در عوض مقدار قابل توجهی بحثهای پراکنده راجع به نگرانیها از تحریف واقعیت در مورد عکاسی و سوء استفاده کردن از سوژه حین عکاسی یا سوء استفاده موقع نمایش عکس صحبت کرده و به عکسهای زیادی هم اشاره میکنه و راجع بهشون اطلاعات جالبی میده.
سر جمع به نظرم کتاب خیلی فوقالعادهای میتونست باشه اولا اگر نظم و ترتیب بهتری میداشت، دوما اگر مفصلتر بود و مسائل رو بهتر تشریح میکرد و سوما اینکه همه عکسها و نقاشیهایی که اشاره میکنه رو در داخل متن میگذاشت.
پ.ن: نشر چشمه، چندتا دونه از عکس ها رو در آخر کتاب آورده. من البته این رو وقتی کتاب به صفحات آخرش رسید تازه فهمیدم :/ و در حین خوندن با اینکه خیلی سرچ میکردم به خاطر قدیمی بودن عکسها و عکاسها، خیلی سخت میشد عکسها رو پیدا کرد. ای کاش همه رو میاورد. ولی بازم کاچی بعض هیچی!ا
ا" آن کس که هنوز از دیدن آنچه انسان قادر است ظالمانه بر سر هم نوع خود آورد، سرخورده میشود ( یا حتی در مورد آن تردید دارد) هنوز به بلوغ رفتاری و روانی نرسیده است – {با اندکی تصرف} "ا
کتاب بحث جالبی رو مطرح میکنه مبنی بر اینکه انسان اساسا علاقهمند به تماشای درد و رنجه. اونقدر که ادعا میکنه عطشی که برای نمایش بدنهای ستمدیده وجود داره به اندازه بدنهای برهنه قویه و میاد اشاراتی میکنه که چطور طی قرون متمادی تصور و تصویرسازی جهنم هر دو مشخصه از لذتهای اصلی رو ارضا میکردن. یا چطور بخش قابل توجهی از هنر به مفهوم رنج و حتی شکنجه کردن تخصیص پیدا کرده. البته نقش مذاهب رو نباید در این میان نادیده گرفت که البته خودش میتونه و احتمالا تا حد زیادی متاثر از همین میل ذاتی انسان شده. بگذریم.
این میل رو امروز میشه در صنعت فیلم و سرگرمیهای ژانر خشونت و یا وحشت دنبال کرد که خوب عدهای به طور عیان این تمایل رو از خودشون بروز میدن. اما در مورد افراد متینتر (!)، کافیه راهبندان و ترافیکی که ناشی از توقف سماجتآمیز خودروها و عابران متعدد، برای دیدن بدن متلاشی و صورت خونین فرد تصادف کرده هست، رو به یاد بیاریم. همه ما، به نوعی خواسته یا ناخواسته چشمچرانیم. این حقیقته که نوعی لذت خاموش در تماشای رنج دیگران در درون انسان وجود داره
متاسفانه بحث سونتاگ در این کتاب خیلی پراکنده است و همین باعث میشه لذت خوندن کتاب بسیار منقطع باشه. چون دائما بین جنبههای مختلف "نمایش و مشاهده تصاویر جنگ" پرش میکنه. کتاب عنوان میکنه که به طور کلی به موضوع نمایش تصاویر جنگی میشه به دو شکل نگاه کرد
• یکی اینه نمایش عکسها خوبه، چون باعث میشن جنگها فراموش نشن و همواره به یاد آورده بشن
• یکی دیگه اینکه نمایش عکسها بده، چون جهان رو با عکس اشباع میکنه و به تدریج مردم بیتفاوت و پوستکلفت میشن
سونتاگ بحث میکنه که مشکل تفکر دوم، در عکاسی از جنگها و مصائب انسانها نیست. بلکه در مدیایی هست که اونها رو نمایش میده. در این راستا توضیح میده که چطور تلویزیون عذاب جنگ رو به ابتذال میکشونه. چون موجودیت تلویزیون بر تعویض سریع کانالها استواره. هر چیزی که شما رو ملول و کسل کنه در آنی میتونه با چیزی مفرح و حتی مبتذل جایگزین بشه. و این مدیای نمایش تصاویر هست که باید محکوم بشه نه عکاسی از مصائب بشر. امروز عینا همین استدلال رو میتونیم در مورد شبکههای مجازی و تا حدی سایتهای اینترنتی هم عنوان کنیم. حس ترحم انسان به واسطه سواستفاده بیحد و حصر از تکنولوژی در حال کرخ شدنه
از طرف دیگه، سونتاگ گریزی میزنه به این موضوع جالب که به خاطر اشتهای همیشگی انسان به تصاویر دلخراش، خواهناخواه حضور سایه پلید تجارت تثبیت میشه. اما متاسفانه در این باب خیلی ورود نمیکنه. یا مثلا در جای دیگهای، سونتاگ روی حسی که در انسان در موقع دیدن عکس مصائب مردمان جنگزده به وجود میاد تمرکز میکنه. اینکه عمدتا این حس، چیزی شبیه دلسوزی سادهلوحانه است مبتنی بر اینکه "کاری از دست من برنمیاد". سونتاگ بحث میکنه که این حسی نادرست و به نوعی نابود کننده اون حس ترحمی هست که باید آگاهانه در انسان برانگیخته بشه. بحث جالبیه اما متاسفانه باز چندان این ترحم آگاهانه رو تشریح نمیکنه و خیلی سریع از روش عبور میکنه.
در عوض مقدار قابل توجهی بحثهای پراکنده راجع به نگرانیها از تحریف واقعیت در مورد عکاسی و سوء استفاده کردن از سوژه حین عکاسی یا سوء استفاده موقع نمایش عکس صحبت کرده و به عکسهای زیادی هم اشاره میکنه و راجع بهشون اطلاعات جالبی میده.
سر جمع به نظرم کتاب خیلی فوقالعادهای میتونست باشه اولا اگر نظم و ترتیب بهتری میداشت، دوما اگر مفصلتر بود و مسائل رو بهتر تشریح میکرد و سوما اینکه همه عکسها و نقاشیهایی که اشاره میکنه رو در داخل متن میگذاشت.
پ.ن: نشر چشمه، چندتا دونه از عکس ها رو در آخر کتاب آورده. من البته این رو وقتی کتاب به صفحات آخرش رسید تازه فهمیدم :/ و در حین خوندن با اینکه خیلی سرچ میکردم به خاطر قدیمی بودن عکسها و عکاسها، خیلی سخت میشد عکسها رو پیدا کرد. ای کاش همه رو میاورد. ولی بازم کاچی بعض هیچی!ا
August 13, 2018
حکایت رنج برای هر کسی تعبیری داره گویا. مثل زنی که رنجور بود از ناهمخوانی رنگ چشم هاش با آسمان! رنج هم پدیده ی غریبی ست به ویژه اگر دستمالی هم بشود و بشود ابزار فخرفروشی یا حتا گاهی مغز فروشی
نادانی هم شیوه ی رایجی ست از رنج کشیدن اما نه برای خود شخص نادان که برای دیگرانی که به آن نظر می اندازند! پیگیر بودن و منفعل بودنِ هم سو به گمانم همان آفتی ست که جا به جا در کتاب می بینم. مدام پیگیر رنج بودن و از سویی کنش گر نبودن؛ نمونه ی برجسته اش هم شبکه های اجتماعی و پست های پیاپی در همدردی! گویی این هم تنشی دیگر در عصر حاضر
باری توحش و خشونت همیشه گیرایی هایی هم دارد و مخلص کلام که آدمیزاد درنده ترین و گاه بی احساس ترین چیزی ست که در تمام جهان یافت می شود
*
نشر گمان کتاب را خوب چاپ زده و ترجمه اش هم پذیرفته است اما عکسهای متن را ابدن خوب چاپ نکرده اند. کوچک و بی کیفیت! نمی دانم در کتاب اصلی چگونه بوده است
1397/05/19
نادانی هم شیوه ی رایجی ست از رنج کشیدن اما نه برای خود شخص نادان که برای دیگرانی که به آن نظر می اندازند! پیگیر بودن و منفعل بودنِ هم سو به گمانم همان آفتی ست که جا به جا در کتاب می بینم. مدام پیگیر رنج بودن و از سویی کنش گر نبودن؛ نمونه ی برجسته اش هم شبکه های اجتماعی و پست های پیاپی در همدردی! گویی این هم تنشی دیگر در عصر حاضر
باری توحش و خشونت همیشه گیرایی هایی هم دارد و مخلص کلام که آدمیزاد درنده ترین و گاه بی احساس ترین چیزی ست که در تمام جهان یافت می شود
*
نشر گمان کتاب را خوب چاپ زده و ترجمه اش هم پذیرفته است اما عکسهای متن را ابدن خوب چاپ نکرده اند. کوچک و بی کیفیت! نمی دانم در کتاب اصلی چگونه بوده است
1397/05/19
September 27, 2014
Reducing The Pain of The Other
Susan Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.
Sontag attacks the modern obsession with photography, with documenting everything. She looks at all the arguments on why photography might help us understand better the suffering and trauma of war - of 'the pain of others' - but concludes that it is an ineffective medium because it reduces the observer to a single frame instead of taking him/her beyond to the true excesses of suffering that is trapped within the same frame, just out of reach.
In fact, she equates photography and war, saying that one cannot exist without the other:
There is no war without photography, that notable aesthete of war Ernst Jiinger observed in 1930, thereby refining the irrepressible identification of the camera and the gun, "shooting" a subject and shooting a human being. War-making and picture-taking are congruent activities: "It is the same intelligence, whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to the exact second and meter," wrote Jiinger, "that labors to preserve the great historical event in fine detail."
Instead of bringing home the reality of war and pain, photography transmutes horror into an aesthetic - into fiction - into the 'surreal'.
Instead she proposes that words should be the medium of conveying this pain, for photographs also enlist some baser 'spectatorship' appetite. Perhaps through works such as Dexter Filkins' writings? She even goes on to suggest that maybe a censuring os some sort should be involved so that we are not caught in an eternal ratchet - gory pictures make us more inured and we need gorier pictures, so the next war can ratchet up its violence till the new requirement/limit is satisfied? She admits that this sort of censure is not going to happen, so it is up to the reading public (perhaps?) to deliberately avoid such representations of 'the pain of others'.
We have to accept that:
These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? "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.
July 3, 2007
Sontag's essay is concerned with the moral implications of looking, through photographs, at people who are suffering or dead. Much of the book is a history of war photography, which is intimately bound with the history of public tolerance of violent photos. While Sontag does not provide any revolutionary ideas, the essay is a succinct and thorough examination of the issues surrounding photography. And, if there is no grand thesis to keep in mind, her exploration is full of smaller, thought-provoking observations. She notes, for example, that displaying photos of dead bodies is less taboo the more foreign and faraway those bodies are. Until she pointed it out, I had not even realised how North American coverage of 9-11 included practically no pictures of corpses, although picturing the dead in foreign conflicts is an expectable way of rallying support for the victims. Her remarks on the way a photo replaces the memory of the thing itself are, if not surprising, good to have restated.
Sontag also does not ignore the uncomfortable reality of the pleasure which most people have in regarding suffering, but in this as in many areas of her essay, I wished that she would go further, spend more time teasing out and elaborating her analysis -- I wished, in other words, that she had written a real book-length book, not a long essay. On the other hand, the incompleteness of her discussion means that it is particularly good at stimulating further thought, at opening questions rather than closing them off.
Sontag also does not ignore the uncomfortable reality of the pleasure which most people have in regarding suffering, but in this as in many areas of her essay, I wished that she would go further, spend more time teasing out and elaborating her analysis -- I wished, in other words, that she had written a real book-length book, not a long essay. On the other hand, the incompleteness of her discussion means that it is particularly good at stimulating further thought, at opening questions rather than closing them off.
February 10, 2024
An absolute must-read for anybody who's ever pondered the sufferings of others.
متأسفانه در ابتدای فصل ۵ فهمیدم که ترجمهی "زهرا درویشیان و نشر چشمه" ایرادات اساسی داره و مجبور شدم به متن اصلی مراجعه کنم. که البته توفیق اجباری لذتبخشی بود اگر بر لذتبخش خواندن متنی در باب رنج دیگران خرده گرفته نشود.
Book Excerpts
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"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. The dual powers of photography—to generate documents and to create works of visual art—have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do. Lately, the most common exaggeration is one that regards these powers as opposites. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize. In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture’s status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!"
"When Leonardo da Vinci gives instructions for a battle painting, he insists that artists have the courage and the imagination to show war in all its ghastliness:
Make the conquered and beaten pale, with brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain … and the teeth apart as with crying out in lamentation … Make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust … and let the blood be seen by its color flowing in a sinuous stream from the corpse to the dust. Others in the death agony grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies, and the legs distorted."
"...to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins. To acknowledge the beauty of photographs of the World Trade Center ruins in the months following the attack seemed frivolous, sacrilegious. The most people dared say was that the photographs were “surreal,” a hectic euphemism behind which the disgraced notion of beauty cowered."
"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."
"The German historian Barbara Duden has said that when she was teaching a course in the history of representations of the body at a large American state university some years ago, not one student in a class of twenty undergraduates could identify the subject of any of the canonical paintings of the Flagellation she showed as slides. (“I think it’s a religious picture,” one ventured.) The only canonical image of Jesus she could count on most students being able to identify was the Crucifixion."
"Often something looks, or is felt to look, “better” in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.) Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock."
"...Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting—in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images."
"...Representations of the Crucifixion do not become banal to believers, if they really are believers. This is even more true of staged representations. Performances of Chushingura, probably the best-known narrative in all of Japanese culture, can be counted on to make a Japanese audience sob when Lord Asano admires the beauty of the cherry blossoms on his way to where he must commit seppuku—sob each time, no matter how often they have followed the story (as a Kabuki or Bunraku play, as a film); the ta‘ziyah drama of the betrayal and murder of Imam Hussayn does not cease to bring an Iranian audience to tears no matter how many times they have seen the martyrdom enacted. On the contrary. They weep, in part, because they have seen it many times. People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out."
"Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan. And photographs help construct—and revise—our sense of a more distant past, with the posthumous shocks engineered by the circulation of hitherto unknown photographs. Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas “memories,” and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory—part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction."
"To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States—a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history—is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful, belief in American exceptionalism. The national consensus on American history as a history of progress is a new setting for distressing photographs—one that focuses our attention on wrongs, both here and elsewhere, for which America sees itself as the solution or cure."
"Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. Consider one of the unforgettable images of the war in Bosnia, a photograph of which the New York Times foreign correspondent John Kifner wrote: “The image is stark, one of the most enduring of the Balkan wars: a Serb militiaman casually kicking a dying Muslim woman in the head. It tells you everything you need to know.” But of course it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know."
"...The lynching pictures tell us about human wickedness. About inhumanity. They force us to think about the extent of the evil unleashed specifically by racism. Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it. The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree. The display of these pictures makes us spectators, too."
"What is the point of exhibiting these pictures? To awaken indignation? To make us feel “bad”; that is, to appall and sadden? To help us mourn? Is looking at such pictures really necessary, given that these horrors lie in a past remote enough to be beyond punishment? Are we the better for seeing these images? Do they actually teach us anything? Don’t they rather just confirm what we already know (or want to know)?"
"Some people, it was said, might dispute the need for this grisly photographic display, lest it cater to voyeuristic appetites and perpetuate images of black victimization—or simply numb the mind. Nevertheless, it was argued, there is an obligation to “examine”—the more clinical “examine” is substituted for “look at”—the pictures. It was further argued that submitting to the ordeal should help us understand such atrocities not as the acts of “barbarians” but as the reflection of a belief system, racism, that by defining one people as less human than another legitimates torture and murder. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else.)"
"...one person’s “barbarian” is another person’s “just doing what everybody else is doing.” (How many can be expected to do better than that?) The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America. More than one hundred thousand civilians, three-fourths of them women, were massacred in the RAF firebombing of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945; seventy-two thousand civilians were incinerated in seconds by the American bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The roll call could be much longer. Again, Whom do we wish to blame? Which atrocities from the incurable past do we think we are obliged to revisit?"
"One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience. Most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest. (The Disasters of War is notably an exception: Goya’s images cannot be looked at in a spirit of prurience. They don’t dwell on the beauty of the human body; bodies are heavy, and thickly clothed.) All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic. But images of the repulsive can also allure. Everyone knows that what slows down highway traffic going past a horrendous car crash is not only curiosity. It is also, for many, the wish to see something gruesome. Calling such wishes “morbid” suggests a rare aberration, but the attraction to such sights is not rare, and is a perennial source of inner torment."
"People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid. As everyone has observed, there is a mounting level of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture: films, television, comics, computer games. Imagery that would have had an audience cringing and recoiling in disgust forty years ago is watched without so much as a blink by every teenager in the multiplex. Indeed, mayhem is entertaining rather than shocking to many people in most modern cultures. But not all violence is watched with equal detachment. Some disasters are more apt subjects of irony than others."
"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."
"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 an 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."
"...The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored. Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump-started, again and again. Content is no more than one of these stimulants. A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness—just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling."
"THE ARGUMENT THAT modern life consists of a diet of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we gradually become habituated is a founding idea of the critique of modernity—the critique being almost as old as modernity itself."
"Since On Photography, many critics have suggested that the excruciations of war—thanks to television—have devolved into a nightly banality. Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react. Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis. But what is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an “ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. 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."
"...the vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images. According to a highly influential analysis, we live in a “society of spectacle.” Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media."
"Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier, from one’s chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority. In fact, deriding the efforts of those who have borne witness in war zones as “war tourism” is such a recurrent judgment that it has spilled over into the discussion of war photography as a profession."
"...victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique. In early 1994, the English photojournalist Paul Lowe, who had been living for more than a year in the besieged city, mounted an exhibit at a partly wrecked art gallery of the photographs he had been taking, along with photographs he’d taken a few years earlier in Somalia; the Sarajevans, though eager to see new pictures of the ongoing destruction of their city, were offended by the inclusion of the Somalia pictures. Lowe had thought the matter was a simple one. He was a professional photographer, and these were two bodies of work of which he was proud. For the Sarajevans, it was also simple. To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo’s martyrdom to a mere instance. The atrocities taking place in Sarajevo have nothing to do with what happens in Africa, they exclaimed. Undoubtedly there was a racist tinge to their indignation—Bosnians are Europeans, people in Sarajevo never tired of pointing out to their foreign friends—but they would have objected too if, instead, pictures of atrocities committed against civilians in Chechnya or in Kosovo, indeed in any other country, had been included in the show. It is intolerable to have one’s own sufferings twinned with anybody else’s.'"
"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. 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. 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."
"...Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us—grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited."
"It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision—the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. But this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.
There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: “Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”"
"Much of the current skepticism about the work of certain photographers of conscience seems to amount to little more than displeasure at the fact that photographs are circulated so diversely; that there is no way to guarantee reverential conditions in which to look at these pictures and be fully responsive to them. Indeed, apart from the settings where patriotic deference to leaders is exercised, there seems no way to guarantee contemplative or inhibiting space for anything now."
"...A museum or gallery visit is a social situation, riddled with distractions, in the course of which art is seen and commented on. Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. Eventually the specificity of the photographs’ accusations will fade; the denunciation of a particular conflict and attribution of specific crimes will become a denunciation of human cruelty, human savagery as such. The photographer’s intentions are irrelevant to this larger process."
متأسفانه در ابتدای فصل ۵ فهمیدم که ترجمهی "زهرا درویشیان و نشر چشمه" ایرادات اساسی داره و مجبور شدم به متن اصلی مراجعه کنم. که البته توفیق اجباری لذتبخشی بود اگر بر لذتبخش خواندن متنی در باب رنج دیگران خرده گرفته نشود.
Book Excerpts
__________________________________________________________
"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. The dual powers of photography—to generate documents and to create works of visual art—have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do. Lately, the most common exaggeration is one that regards these powers as opposites. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize. In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture’s status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!"
"When Leonardo da Vinci gives instructions for a battle painting, he insists that artists have the courage and the imagination to show war in all its ghastliness:
Make the conquered and beaten pale, with brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain … and the teeth apart as with crying out in lamentation … Make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust … and let the blood be seen by its color flowing in a sinuous stream from the corpse to the dust. Others in the death agony grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies, and the legs distorted."
"...to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins. To acknowledge the beauty of photographs of the World Trade Center ruins in the months following the attack seemed frivolous, sacrilegious. The most people dared say was that the photographs were “surreal,” a hectic euphemism behind which the disgraced notion of beauty cowered."
"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."
"The German historian Barbara Duden has said that when she was teaching a course in the history of representations of the body at a large American state university some years ago, not one student in a class of twenty undergraduates could identify the subject of any of the canonical paintings of the Flagellation she showed as slides. (“I think it’s a religious picture,” one ventured.) The only canonical image of Jesus she could count on most students being able to identify was the Crucifixion."
"Often something looks, or is felt to look, “better” in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.) Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock."
"...Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting—in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images."
"...Representations of the Crucifixion do not become banal to believers, if they really are believers. This is even more true of staged representations. Performances of Chushingura, probably the best-known narrative in all of Japanese culture, can be counted on to make a Japanese audience sob when Lord Asano admires the beauty of the cherry blossoms on his way to where he must commit seppuku—sob each time, no matter how often they have followed the story (as a Kabuki or Bunraku play, as a film); the ta‘ziyah drama of the betrayal and murder of Imam Hussayn does not cease to bring an Iranian audience to tears no matter how many times they have seen the martyrdom enacted. On the contrary. They weep, in part, because they have seen it many times. People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out."
"Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan. And photographs help construct—and revise—our sense of a more distant past, with the posthumous shocks engineered by the circulation of hitherto unknown photographs. Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas “memories,” and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory—part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction."
"To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States—a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history—is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful, belief in American exceptionalism. The national consensus on American history as a history of progress is a new setting for distressing photographs—one that focuses our attention on wrongs, both here and elsewhere, for which America sees itself as the solution or cure."
"Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. Consider one of the unforgettable images of the war in Bosnia, a photograph of which the New York Times foreign correspondent John Kifner wrote: “The image is stark, one of the most enduring of the Balkan wars: a Serb militiaman casually kicking a dying Muslim woman in the head. It tells you everything you need to know.” But of course it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know."
"...The lynching pictures tell us about human wickedness. About inhumanity. They force us to think about the extent of the evil unleashed specifically by racism. Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it. The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree. The display of these pictures makes us spectators, too."
"What is the point of exhibiting these pictures? To awaken indignation? To make us feel “bad”; that is, to appall and sadden? To help us mourn? Is looking at such pictures really necessary, given that these horrors lie in a past remote enough to be beyond punishment? Are we the better for seeing these images? Do they actually teach us anything? Don’t they rather just confirm what we already know (or want to know)?"
"Some people, it was said, might dispute the need for this grisly photographic display, lest it cater to voyeuristic appetites and perpetuate images of black victimization—or simply numb the mind. Nevertheless, it was argued, there is an obligation to “examine”—the more clinical “examine” is substituted for “look at”—the pictures. It was further argued that submitting to the ordeal should help us understand such atrocities not as the acts of “barbarians” but as the reflection of a belief system, racism, that by defining one people as less human than another legitimates torture and murder. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else.)"
"...one person’s “barbarian” is another person’s “just doing what everybody else is doing.” (How many can be expected to do better than that?) The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America. More than one hundred thousand civilians, three-fourths of them women, were massacred in the RAF firebombing of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945; seventy-two thousand civilians were incinerated in seconds by the American bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The roll call could be much longer. Again, Whom do we wish to blame? Which atrocities from the incurable past do we think we are obliged to revisit?"
"One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience. Most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest. (The Disasters of War is notably an exception: Goya’s images cannot be looked at in a spirit of prurience. They don’t dwell on the beauty of the human body; bodies are heavy, and thickly clothed.) All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic. But images of the repulsive can also allure. Everyone knows that what slows down highway traffic going past a horrendous car crash is not only curiosity. It is also, for many, the wish to see something gruesome. Calling such wishes “morbid” suggests a rare aberration, but the attraction to such sights is not rare, and is a perennial source of inner torment."
"People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid. As everyone has observed, there is a mounting level of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture: films, television, comics, computer games. Imagery that would have had an audience cringing and recoiling in disgust forty years ago is watched without so much as a blink by every teenager in the multiplex. Indeed, mayhem is entertaining rather than shocking to many people in most modern cultures. But not all violence is watched with equal detachment. Some disasters are more apt subjects of irony than others."
"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."
"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 an 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."
"...The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored. Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump-started, again and again. Content is no more than one of these stimulants. A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness—just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling."
"THE ARGUMENT THAT modern life consists of a diet of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we gradually become habituated is a founding idea of the critique of modernity—the critique being almost as old as modernity itself."
"Since On Photography, many critics have suggested that the excruciations of war—thanks to television—have devolved into a nightly banality. Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react. Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis. But what is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an “ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. 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."
"...the vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images. According to a highly influential analysis, we live in a “society of spectacle.” Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media."
"Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier, from one’s chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority. In fact, deriding the efforts of those who have borne witness in war zones as “war tourism” is such a recurrent judgment that it has spilled over into the discussion of war photography as a profession."
"...victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique. In early 1994, the English photojournalist Paul Lowe, who had been living for more than a year in the besieged city, mounted an exhibit at a partly wrecked art gallery of the photographs he had been taking, along with photographs he’d taken a few years earlier in Somalia; the Sarajevans, though eager to see new pictures of the ongoing destruction of their city, were offended by the inclusion of the Somalia pictures. Lowe had thought the matter was a simple one. He was a professional photographer, and these were two bodies of work of which he was proud. For the Sarajevans, it was also simple. To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo’s martyrdom to a mere instance. The atrocities taking place in Sarajevo have nothing to do with what happens in Africa, they exclaimed. Undoubtedly there was a racist tinge to their indignation—Bosnians are Europeans, people in Sarajevo never tired of pointing out to their foreign friends—but they would have objected too if, instead, pictures of atrocities committed against civilians in Chechnya or in Kosovo, indeed in any other country, had been included in the show. It is intolerable to have one’s own sufferings twinned with anybody else’s.'"
"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. 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. 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."
"...Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us—grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited."
"It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision—the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. But this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.
There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: “Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”"
"Much of the current skepticism about the work of certain photographers of conscience seems to amount to little more than displeasure at the fact that photographs are circulated so diversely; that there is no way to guarantee reverential conditions in which to look at these pictures and be fully responsive to them. Indeed, apart from the settings where patriotic deference to leaders is exercised, there seems no way to guarantee contemplative or inhibiting space for anything now."
"...A museum or gallery visit is a social situation, riddled with distractions, in the course of which art is seen and commented on. Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. Eventually the specificity of the photographs’ accusations will fade; the denunciation of a particular conflict and attribution of specific crimes will become a denunciation of human cruelty, human savagery as such. The photographer’s intentions are irrelevant to this larger process."
March 27, 2024
Цікавий, обʼємний і дуже вчасний есей. Вчасний, бо коли говоримо про війну, то говоримо і про фотодокументацію війни. Уникнути фотографій неможливо. Зображення проникають з усіх екранів, а часом й інших площин у публічному просторі. Тому хочеться зрозуміти, а що ж відбувається із нами глядачами (а часом спостерігачами), коли ми взаємодіємо з фотографіями, про що вони, як змінювалися підходи до зображення війни за 170 років фотодокументування.
Як дивиться на фотографії людина, для якої війна щось близьке й особисте, а як дивиться сторонній глядач, для якого це щось делеке; чи є точка, у якій закінчується емпатія спостерігача; як фотографії війни взаємодіють з публчним простором - коли вони мають експонуватися у торгових центрах, а коли у галереях; коли фотографи, які працюють з темою війни перестали бути митцями й стали журналістами; чи може фото бути доказом чи воно є історичним фактом; якою є етика за спостереженням страждань "чужих" і "своїх"; чому ми боїмося, але не перестаємо дивитися на страшні світлини, що це за вуаєристська жага?
Книжка ставить питання і почасти дає на них відповіді, пропонуючи реальні фотографії (які треба повсякчас ґуґлити), які пояснюють, яким є шлях спостереження за болем інших.
Книжка провокує думати, ставити запитання, знову думати.
Як дивиться на фотографії людина, для якої війна щось близьке й особисте, а як дивиться сторонній глядач, для якого це щось делеке; чи є точка, у якій закінчується емпатія спостерігача; як фотографії війни взаємодіють з публчним простором - коли вони мають експонуватися у торгових центрах, а коли у галереях; коли фотографи, які працюють з темою війни перестали бути митцями й стали журналістами; чи може фото бути доказом чи воно є історичним фактом; якою є етика за спостереженням страждань "чужих" і "своїх"; чому ми боїмося, але не перестаємо дивитися на страшні світлини, що це за вуаєристська жага?
Книжка ставить питання і почасти дає на них відповіді, пропонуючи реальні фотографії (які треба повсякчас ґуґлити), які пояснюють, яким є шлях спостереження за болем інших.
Книжка провокує думати, ставити запитання, знову думати.
March 17, 2017
این اولین متنی بود که از سانتاگ خوندهم. چه کار خوبی کردم!
به راحتی و با گستاخی دلچسبی حرفش رو میزنه.
یه نگاه هم به هیچکدوم از تردیدها و تهدیدهایی که ممکنه نسبت به ایدههاش بشه نمیندازه و وقت حرف زدن سعی میکنه درستترین حرف رو به بهترین شکل بزنه.
اطمینان خاصی در «حرف زدن» و نه «تالیف» سانتاگ هست که متن رو دلنشین میکنه.
سانتاگ:
میگه و میگه و ترسی نداره. «من این طوری فلان چیز رو میفهمم و به فلان چیز فکر میکنم.»«نظر دیگهای هم اگر هست و بهتر از منه میشنوم. ولی خب، باید خیلی خارقالعاده باشین که از من بهتر باشین!»
«پس اگر بهتر از منی که چه بهتر، اگر هم نیستی که یعنی حرف من رو میشینی و گوش میدی و این خوبه»
کتاب در حد فهم مخاطب عام شروع میشه و فراتر از فهم مخاطب خاص به پایان میرسه. وقت زیادی نمیبره خوندنش و برای هر کسی چیزی داره. ترجمه خوبه و چاپ عالیه. بخونیدش.
به راحتی و با گستاخی دلچسبی حرفش رو میزنه.
یه نگاه هم به هیچکدوم از تردیدها و تهدیدهایی که ممکنه نسبت به ایدههاش بشه نمیندازه و وقت حرف زدن سعی میکنه درستترین حرف رو به بهترین شکل بزنه.
اطمینان خاصی در «حرف زدن» و نه «تالیف» سانتاگ هست که متن رو دلنشین میکنه.
سانتاگ:
میگه و میگه و ترسی نداره. «من این طوری فلان چیز رو میفهمم و به فلان چیز فکر میکنم.»«نظر دیگهای هم اگر هست و بهتر از منه میشنوم. ولی خب، باید خیلی خارقالعاده باشین که از من بهتر باشین!»
«پس اگر بهتر از منی که چه بهتر، اگر هم نیستی که یعنی حرف من رو میشینی و گوش میدی و این خوبه»
کتاب در حد فهم مخاطب عام شروع میشه و فراتر از فهم مخاطب خاص به پایان میرسه. وقت زیادی نمیبره خوندنش و برای هر کسی چیزی داره. ترجمه خوبه و چاپ عالیه. بخونیدش.
September 4, 2016
یکجایی سوزان سانتاگ میگوید که یک عکس خیلی خوب میتواند بر اثر «تصادف» ثبت شود. و اضافه میکند که در ادبیات اما تصادف نمیتواند باعث خلق روایتی شود. (نقل به مضمون) هرچند این جمله یک بخش فرعی از بحث اصلی کتاب است اما به من خیلی چسبید. یکجورهایی همان عقیدهای است که خودم بهش اصرار دارم. درباره اصالت ادبیات.
درباره باقی کتاب باید بگویم که نثر سانتاگ تاثیرگذار، موشکافانه و دقیق است. به زیبایی از حقیقتی پرده برمیدارد که عدهای زیادی متوجهش نیستیم.
درباره باقی کتاب باید بگویم که نثر سانتاگ تاثیرگذار، موشکافانه و دقیق است. به زیبایی از حقیقتی پرده برمیدارد که عدهای زیادی متوجهش نیستیم.
October 31, 2023
"Artık savaşlar hepimizin oturma odalarında sükunet içinde seyredilip dinlenen görüntü ve seslere dönüşmüş durumdadır."
Susan Sontag'ın, ünlü Fotoğraf Üzerine kitabından yaklaşık 20 sene sonra yazdığı ve bir anlamda onun tamamlayıcısı gibi görülebilecek olan "Başkalarının Acısına Bakmak" kitabına elim istemsizce gitti bu dönemde. Filistin'de yaşanmakta olanlardan ötürü başkalarının acısıyla kuşatılmış olduğumuz ve ne yapacağımızı bilemediğimiz bir zamandan geçerken belki biraz anlamlandırmamı sağlar diye umdum.
Virginia Woolf'un benim de çok sevdiğim ve zamanının çok ötesinde bir kitap olduğunu düşündüğüm Üç Gine'si ile başlıyor Sontag anlatısına ve Baudrillard'ın içinde yaşadığımız dünyayı anlamamız için elzem olduğunu düşündüğüm Simülakrlar ve Simülasyon teorisine uzanan bir çerçevede şiddete ve acıya bakma, onunla ilişkilenme biçimlerimizi çözümlüyor ve nitekim mesele şuraya geliyor: ""Modernitenin kocaman midesi gerçekliği çiğneyip yutmuş ve sonra da bütün yediğini görüntüler şeklinde geri tükürmüştür. Oldukça etkili bulunan bir analize göre, hepimiz bir 'gösteri toplumu'nda yaşıyoruz. Gerçeklik, tahtından feragat etmiştir. Ortada artık sadece 'temsiller' -yani medya- vardır."
Yukarıdaki paragraf yanıltıcı olmasın, akademik bir kitap değil bu; her ne kadar bazı teorilerden destek alsa da derdini vicdan ve hatta şefkat ekseninde anlatan çok güçlü bir metin. Şu cümleyi unutmamalı mesela: "Vurgulayarak hatırlatmak isterim ki, resimlerin uyandırdığı acıma ve iğrenme duyguları, sizi hangi resimlerin, hangi zulümlerin, hangi ölümlerin, gösterilmediği sorusunu sormaktan da alıkoymamalıdır" - bir propaganda savaşının da içinden geçmekte olduğumuzu unutmamak ve yaşanan şiddetin maruz kaldığımız kısmının seçilmiş parçalardan oluştuğunu hatırlamak lazım.
Şiddete bakmak, onunla duygudaşlık kurmak bir insani görev midir, yoksa bizi duyarsızlaştıran bir etkisi mi vardır? Şiddete ve acıya bakmanın ardındaki itkinin ne kadarı bu duygudaşlıktan / görev bilincinden; ne kadarı bir tür dikizleme / teşhir merakından kaynaklanır? Bu soruları tam da şu sıra kendimize sormamız gerektiğine inanıyorum. Sontag da bunlara yanıt arıyor işte. Okuyunuz derim.
Susan Sontag'ın, ünlü Fotoğraf Üzerine kitabından yaklaşık 20 sene sonra yazdığı ve bir anlamda onun tamamlayıcısı gibi görülebilecek olan "Başkalarının Acısına Bakmak" kitabına elim istemsizce gitti bu dönemde. Filistin'de yaşanmakta olanlardan ötürü başkalarının acısıyla kuşatılmış olduğumuz ve ne yapacağımızı bilemediğimiz bir zamandan geçerken belki biraz anlamlandırmamı sağlar diye umdum.
Virginia Woolf'un benim de çok sevdiğim ve zamanının çok ötesinde bir kitap olduğunu düşündüğüm Üç Gine'si ile başlıyor Sontag anlatısına ve Baudrillard'ın içinde yaşadığımız dünyayı anlamamız için elzem olduğunu düşündüğüm Simülakrlar ve Simülasyon teorisine uzanan bir çerçevede şiddete ve acıya bakma, onunla ilişkilenme biçimlerimizi çözümlüyor ve nitekim mesele şuraya geliyor: ""Modernitenin kocaman midesi gerçekliği çiğneyip yutmuş ve sonra da bütün yediğini görüntüler şeklinde geri tükürmüştür. Oldukça etkili bulunan bir analize göre, hepimiz bir 'gösteri toplumu'nda yaşıyoruz. Gerçeklik, tahtından feragat etmiştir. Ortada artık sadece 'temsiller' -yani medya- vardır."
Yukarıdaki paragraf yanıltıcı olmasın, akademik bir kitap değil bu; her ne kadar bazı teorilerden destek alsa da derdini vicdan ve hatta şefkat ekseninde anlatan çok güçlü bir metin. Şu cümleyi unutmamalı mesela: "Vurgulayarak hatırlatmak isterim ki, resimlerin uyandırdığı acıma ve iğrenme duyguları, sizi hangi resimlerin, hangi zulümlerin, hangi ölümlerin, gösterilmediği sorusunu sormaktan da alıkoymamalıdır" - bir propaganda savaşının da içinden geçmekte olduğumuzu unutmamak ve yaşanan şiddetin maruz kaldığımız kısmının seçilmiş parçalardan oluştuğunu hatırlamak lazım.
Şiddete bakmak, onunla duygudaşlık kurmak bir insani görev midir, yoksa bizi duyarsızlaştıran bir etkisi mi vardır? Şiddete ve acıya bakmanın ardındaki itkinin ne kadarı bu duygudaşlıktan / görev bilincinden; ne kadarı bir tür dikizleme / teşhir merakından kaynaklanır? Bu soruları tam da şu sıra kendimize sormamız gerektiğine inanıyorum. Sontag da bunlara yanıt arıyor işte. Okuyunuz derim.
October 12, 2018
به نظرم بسیار کتاب خوبیه و خوندنش برای همه ما که مدام در معرض هجوم اطلاعات و رسانهها قرار داریم اون هم در یک دنیای پر از فاجعه و جنگ، واجبه.
قسمت اول کتاب به تاریخچه عکسهایی پرداخته که به بازنمایی جنگ پرداختن و تاثیر و کارکرد اونها رو بصورت خاص در دوره خودشون مطرح کرده. در قسمت دوم بصورت عامتری به بررسی کارکرد عکس و رسانه در بازنمایی رنج دیگران میپردازه. آیا واقعا مشاهده هر روزه عکسهایی از رنج دیگران، ما رو نسبت به رنج و خشونت بیتفاوت میکنه؟ وظیفه ما در قبال این عکسها چیه؟ موقع دیدنشون یک همدردی ساده و گذر کردن، کافیه یا باید کارهای دیگری انجام بدیم؟ برای فهمیدن جواب این سوالها باید خود کتاب رو خوند.
قسمت اول کتاب به تاریخچه عکسهایی پرداخته که به بازنمایی جنگ پرداختن و تاثیر و کارکرد اونها رو بصورت خاص در دوره خودشون مطرح کرده. در قسمت دوم بصورت عامتری به بررسی کارکرد عکس و رسانه در بازنمایی رنج دیگران میپردازه. آیا واقعا مشاهده هر روزه عکسهایی از رنج دیگران، ما رو نسبت به رنج و خشونت بیتفاوت میکنه؟ وظیفه ما در قبال این عکسها چیه؟ موقع دیدنشون یک همدردی ساده و گذر کردن، کافیه یا باید کارهای دیگری انجام بدیم؟ برای فهمیدن جواب این سوالها باید خود کتاب رو خوند.
July 20, 2025
"منذ اختراع الكاميرا في عام 1839، ظل التصوير مصاحبًا للموت. لأن الصورة التي تنتجها تلك الآلة هي حرفيًا أثر لشئ استحضر أمام العدسة. كانت الصور أعظم من أية لوحة كتذكار للماضي الذي تلاشى والإنسان العزيز الذي رحل. والإمساك بالموت لحظة حدوثه كان مسألة أخرى".
في هذا الكتيب الرائع تبين "سونتاج" أهمية فن التصوير الفوتوجرافي في عالمنا الإنساني، حيث يجعلنا نلتفت لألم غيرنا في كل بقاع الأرض قاطبة؛ حيث تؤدي تلك الصور من قتلى مدنيين وبيوت مدمرة على تسريع كراهية الظلم والعدوان، وذلك عبر تكرار بث صور الموت والدمار، كما أنها تعمل على توثيق للأعمال الوحشية التي يرتكبها ذلك العدو المتوحش، والصور لضحايا الحرب نوع من البلاغة. فهي تكرر وتبسط وتثير وتخلق الوهم بوجود الإجماع عليها.
"إعتقد بعض الناس لفترة طويلة من الوقت أن الرعب، إذا نُقل بصورة حية على نحو كاف، فإن معظم الناس سوف يستوعبون في النهاية فظاعة وجنون الحرب".
تستعرض الكاتبة فظاعة مشاهد الحروب وتوثيقها الذي بدأ مع الحرب الأهلية الإسبانية (1936-1939) حيث كانت أول حرب تُشاهد وتُغطى بالمعنى الحديث لنقل صور الحروب ومشاهدها، من خلال مصورين محترفين على خطوط الاشتباك ومواقع القصف. أما حرب أمريكا في ڤيتنام فهي أول حرب تُشاهد يوميًا عبر كاميرات التلفاز، ومنذ ذلك الوقت أصبحت مشاهد الحروب البعيدة هي متعة المشاهد للشاشة الصغيرة. كما تضمن الحديث عن حرب الخليج وحرب البوسنة وجنين في الأراضي المحتلة.
"إن الإمساك بالموت وهو يحدث فعلًا وتثبيته عبر الزمان أمر تستطيع أن تفعله آلات التصوير فقط. والصور التي يلتقطها المصورون في الميدان للحظة الموت هي أكثر صور يُحتفى بها من بين صور الحرب".
وتقول أيضًا: أن عبر التاريخ كانت الحروب هي القاعدة والسلام هو الاستثناء، فالحرب يتعذر وقفها، والسلام يتعذر تحقيقه. وتضيف أن أهمية الصور في وسائل الإعلام يؤدي إلى حتمية وقوع الحرب فعليًا، وهو ما حصل في التعبئة ضد حرب ڤيتنام من صور للكوارث هناك وجرائم الحرب.
وأخيرًا تقول: أن التوقف عن الالتفات إلى ألم الآخرين يعزلنا عن العالم. حيث أن مشاهدة الصور المتضمنة تلك الآلام قد تكون تطهيرًا نفسيًا، وتشعرنا بالأمان لأننا لسنا داخلها، وخارج المكان والزمان وعلى بعد مسافات منها، وتتسائل: هل يمكن أن نتوقف عن متابعة آلام العالم؟ وهل يمكن أن ننعزل عما يحدث حولنا من عنف وحروب وجنون؟ وكيف يمكننا أن نفهم العالم ونحدث فيه تغييرًا لو انعزلنا عنه؟
كتاب رائع في أهمية فن التصوير في عالم الحروب والكوارث، ولكن يعاب عليه عدم تضمينه أي صور من المذكورة في الكتاب عرفت بعضها من الذاكرة، وبحثت عن الغير معلوم على الشبكة العنكبوتية. كان آخر كتاب تكتبه سونتاج قبل وفاتها.
"لا نستطيع أن نتخيل كم هي الحرب مخيفة، مرعبة، وكيف تصبح شيئًا عاديًا. لا نستطيع أن نفهم، لا نستطيع أن نتخيل. ذلك ما يحسه كل جندي، وكل صحفي ومنقذ ومراقب محايد أمضى زمنًا تحت النار، وحالفه الحظ ليتفادى الموت الذي صرع الآخرين بجواره. وهم على حق".
في هذا الكتيب الرائع تبين "سونتاج" أهمية فن التصوير الفوتوجرافي في عالمنا الإنساني، حيث يجعلنا نلتفت لألم غيرنا في كل بقاع الأرض قاطبة؛ حيث تؤدي تلك الصور من قتلى مدنيين وبيوت مدمرة على تسريع كراهية الظلم والعدوان، وذلك عبر تكرار بث صور الموت والدمار، كما أنها تعمل على توثيق للأعمال الوحشية التي يرتكبها ذلك العدو المتوحش، والصور لضحايا الحرب نوع من البلاغة. فهي تكرر وتبسط وتثير وتخلق الوهم بوجود الإجماع عليها.
"إعتقد بعض الناس لفترة طويلة من الوقت أن الرعب، إذا نُقل بصورة حية على نحو كاف، فإن معظم الناس سوف يستوعبون في النهاية فظاعة وجنون الحرب".
تستعرض الكاتبة فظاعة مشاهد الحروب وتوثيقها الذي بدأ مع الحرب الأهلية الإسبانية (1936-1939) حيث كانت أول حرب تُشاهد وتُغطى بالمعنى الحديث لنقل صور الحروب ومشاهدها، من خلال مصورين محترفين على خطوط الاشتباك ومواقع القصف. أما حرب أمريكا في ڤيتنام فهي أول حرب تُشاهد يوميًا عبر كاميرات التلفاز، ومنذ ذلك الوقت أصبحت مشاهد الحروب البعيدة هي متعة المشاهد للشاشة الصغيرة. كما تضمن الحديث عن حرب الخليج وحرب البوسنة وجنين في الأراضي المحتلة.
"إن الإمساك بالموت وهو يحدث فعلًا وتثبيته عبر الزمان أمر تستطيع أن تفعله آلات التصوير فقط. والصور التي يلتقطها المصورون في الميدان للحظة الموت هي أكثر صور يُحتفى بها من بين صور الحرب".
وتقول أيضًا: أن عبر التاريخ كانت الحروب هي القاعدة والسلام هو الاستثناء، فالحرب يتعذر وقفها، والسلام يتعذر تحقيقه. وتضيف أن أهمية الصور في وسائل الإعلام يؤدي إلى حتمية وقوع الحرب فعليًا، وهو ما حصل في التعبئة ضد حرب ڤيتنام من صور للكوارث هناك وجرائم الحرب.
وأخيرًا تقول: أن التوقف عن الالتفات إلى ألم الآخرين يعزلنا عن العالم. حيث أن مشاهدة الصور المتضمنة تلك الآلام قد تكون تطهيرًا نفسيًا، وتشعرنا بالأمان لأننا لسنا داخلها، وخارج المكان والزمان وعلى بعد مسافات منها، وتتسائل: هل يمكن أن نتوقف عن متابعة آلام العالم؟ وهل يمكن أن ننعزل عما يحدث حولنا من عنف وحروب وجنون؟ وكيف يمكننا أن نفهم العالم ونحدث فيه تغييرًا لو انعزلنا عنه؟
كتاب رائع في أهمية فن التصوير في عالم الحروب والكوارث، ولكن يعاب عليه عدم تضمينه أي صور من المذكورة في الكتاب عرفت بعضها من الذاكرة، وبحثت عن الغير معلوم على الشبكة العنكبوتية. كان آخر كتاب تكتبه سونتاج قبل وفاتها.
"لا نستطيع أن نتخيل كم هي الحرب مخيفة، مرعبة، وكيف تصبح شيئًا عاديًا. لا نستطيع أن نفهم، لا نستطيع أن نتخيل. ذلك ما يحسه كل جندي، وكل صحفي ومنقذ ومراقب محايد أمضى زمنًا تحت النار، وحالفه الحظ ليتفادى الموت الذي صرع الآخرين بجواره. وهم على حق".
August 25, 2025
Essas imagens não podem ser mais do que um convite a prestar atenção, a reflectir, a aprender, a examinar as racionalizações que os poderes instituídos oferecem para o sofrimento colectivo. Quem causou aquilo que a fotografia mostra? Quem é responsável? Será desculpável? Era inevitável? Haverá um estado das coisas que até agora aceitámos e que deva ser posto em causa?
A propósito da guerra, aliás, das várias guerras do século XX das quais resultaram imagens chocantemente famosas, Susan Sontag escreveu em 2003, um ano antes de morrer, este livro incontornável, que infelizmente não perdeu o sentido nem a actualidade.
Para um judeu israelita, a fotografia de uma criança dilacerada no ataque à pizaria Sbarrona na baixa de Jerusalém é antes de mais a fotografia de uma criança judia morta por um bombista-suicida palestiniano. Para um palestiniano, a fotografia de uma criança dilacerada por um tanque na faixa de Gaza é antes de mais nada a fotografia de uma criança palestiniana morta pela artilharia israelita. Para o militante, a identidade é tudo. E todas as fotografias estão à espera de ser explicadas ou falsificadas pelas legendas.
Numa era em que tudo se deturpa e manipula e a desinformação é a arma mais cobarde da propaganda, Sontag relembra que as fotografias sempre foram usadas para servir causas e influenciar a opinião pública, tanto aquelas captadas como as que deixaram de ser tiradas, tanto aquelas que circulam como aquelas que nunca foram divulgadas. Usa como exemplo duas imagens muito célebres que podem ter sido encenadas: “The Falling Soldier” de Frank Capa (Guerra Civil Espanhola), e “Execution in Saigon” de Eddie Adams (Guerra do Vietname).
A fotografia é como uma citação, uma máxima ou um provérbio. Todos nós armazenamos mentalmente centenas de fotografias, disponíveis para serem lembradas instantaneamente.
“Olhando o Sofrimento dos Outros” tem como ponto de partida “Os Três Guinéus”, o libelo contra a guerra que Virginia Woolf publicou em 1938, em plena Guerra Civil Espanhola e perante a ascensão do fascismo. Instigada por um reputado advogado londrino que lhe perguntara como podemos evitar a guerra, a escritora é rápida a responder-lhe que não poderia sequer haver um verdadeiro diálogo entre eles.
Apesar de pertencerem à mesma classe, “a classe instruída”, separava-os um profundo abismo: o advogado é homem e ela é mulher. Os homens fazem a guerra. Os homens (a maior parte) gostam da guerra, uma vez que para os homens há “alguma glória, alguma necessidade, alguma satisfação no combate” que as mulheres (a maior parte) não sentem nem desfrutam.
E propõe, então, analisar em conjunto as fotografias distribuídas duas vezes por semana pelo governo republicano espanhol, algo inimaginável nos dias de hoje, com imagens a entrar-nos pelos olhos adentro em directo, provocando uma sobrecarga de informação. Com apenas 130 páginas, é surpreendente a quantidade de questões que este ensaio aborda e as considerações que tece, sendo uma das mais desafiadoras o nosso olhar ocidental sobre o Outro, até mesmo quando ele já é um cadáver.
Em geral, os corpos atrozmente mutilados que se vêem nas fotografias que se publicam são da Ásia ou de África. Este costume jornalístico é herdeiro de uma prática velha de séculos de exibir seres humanos exóticos – ou seja, colonizados: africanos e habitantes de remotos países asiáticos eram exibidos como animais num jardim zoológico em exposições etnológicas organizadas em Londres, Paris e outras capitais europeias desde o século XVI até ao princípio do século XX.
Escreve Sontag que a torrente de imagens sobre o sofrimento dos outros lá longe, mas que nos chega diariamente, pode causar um sentimento de impotência ou a dessensibilização. Como ainda não perdi a humanidade nem aceito a banalidade do mal face a uma guerra interminável na outra ponta da Europa e um genocídio em curso do outro lado do Mediterrâneo, sinto de momento uma enorme angústia ao falar destes assuntos e socorro-me do Mestre para sabiamente a resumir.
Em 1915, foi o próprio Henry James, o augusto mestre do complexo acomodar da realidade em palavras, o mágico do verbo, a declarar ao “New York Times”: “Vemo-nos no meio de tudo isto tão incapazes de utilizar as nossas palavras como de suportar os nossos pensamentos. A guerra gastou as palavras; as palavras enfraqueceram, deterioraram-se…”
A propósito da guerra, aliás, das várias guerras do século XX das quais resultaram imagens chocantemente famosas, Susan Sontag escreveu em 2003, um ano antes de morrer, este livro incontornável, que infelizmente não perdeu o sentido nem a actualidade.
Para um judeu israelita, a fotografia de uma criança dilacerada no ataque à pizaria Sbarrona na baixa de Jerusalém é antes de mais a fotografia de uma criança judia morta por um bombista-suicida palestiniano. Para um palestiniano, a fotografia de uma criança dilacerada por um tanque na faixa de Gaza é antes de mais nada a fotografia de uma criança palestiniana morta pela artilharia israelita. Para o militante, a identidade é tudo. E todas as fotografias estão à espera de ser explicadas ou falsificadas pelas legendas.
Numa era em que tudo se deturpa e manipula e a desinformação é a arma mais cobarde da propaganda, Sontag relembra que as fotografias sempre foram usadas para servir causas e influenciar a opinião pública, tanto aquelas captadas como as que deixaram de ser tiradas, tanto aquelas que circulam como aquelas que nunca foram divulgadas. Usa como exemplo duas imagens muito célebres que podem ter sido encenadas: “The Falling Soldier” de Frank Capa (Guerra Civil Espanhola), e “Execution in Saigon” de Eddie Adams (Guerra do Vietname).
A fotografia é como uma citação, uma máxima ou um provérbio. Todos nós armazenamos mentalmente centenas de fotografias, disponíveis para serem lembradas instantaneamente.
“Olhando o Sofrimento dos Outros” tem como ponto de partida “Os Três Guinéus”, o libelo contra a guerra que Virginia Woolf publicou em 1938, em plena Guerra Civil Espanhola e perante a ascensão do fascismo. Instigada por um reputado advogado londrino que lhe perguntara como podemos evitar a guerra, a escritora é rápida a responder-lhe que não poderia sequer haver um verdadeiro diálogo entre eles.
Apesar de pertencerem à mesma classe, “a classe instruída”, separava-os um profundo abismo: o advogado é homem e ela é mulher. Os homens fazem a guerra. Os homens (a maior parte) gostam da guerra, uma vez que para os homens há “alguma glória, alguma necessidade, alguma satisfação no combate” que as mulheres (a maior parte) não sentem nem desfrutam.
E propõe, então, analisar em conjunto as fotografias distribuídas duas vezes por semana pelo governo republicano espanhol, algo inimaginável nos dias de hoje, com imagens a entrar-nos pelos olhos adentro em directo, provocando uma sobrecarga de informação. Com apenas 130 páginas, é surpreendente a quantidade de questões que este ensaio aborda e as considerações que tece, sendo uma das mais desafiadoras o nosso olhar ocidental sobre o Outro, até mesmo quando ele já é um cadáver.
Em geral, os corpos atrozmente mutilados que se vêem nas fotografias que se publicam são da Ásia ou de África. Este costume jornalístico é herdeiro de uma prática velha de séculos de exibir seres humanos exóticos – ou seja, colonizados: africanos e habitantes de remotos países asiáticos eram exibidos como animais num jardim zoológico em exposições etnológicas organizadas em Londres, Paris e outras capitais europeias desde o século XVI até ao princípio do século XX.
Escreve Sontag que a torrente de imagens sobre o sofrimento dos outros lá longe, mas que nos chega diariamente, pode causar um sentimento de impotência ou a dessensibilização. Como ainda não perdi a humanidade nem aceito a banalidade do mal face a uma guerra interminável na outra ponta da Europa e um genocídio em curso do outro lado do Mediterrâneo, sinto de momento uma enorme angústia ao falar destes assuntos e socorro-me do Mestre para sabiamente a resumir.
Em 1915, foi o próprio Henry James, o augusto mestre do complexo acomodar da realidade em palavras, o mágico do verbo, a declarar ao “New York Times”: “Vemo-nos no meio de tudo isto tão incapazes de utilizar as nossas palavras como de suportar os nossos pensamentos. A guerra gastou as palavras; as palavras enfraqueceram, deterioraram-se…”
November 20, 2023
I've just leave a few excepts from this essay here. There is not much one could add to her unflinching and perfectly expressed position. The pity is that it was written 20 years ago and, if anything, her words seem sadly much more relevant.
"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."
"Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us – grandparents, parents, teachers and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another."
"A stepped-up recognition of the monstrousness of the slave system that once existed, unquestioned by most, in the United States is a national project of recent decades that many Euro-Americans feel some tug of obligation to join. This ongoing project is a great achievement, a benchmark of civic virtue. The acknowledgment of the American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in violation of one of the cardinal laws of war) is very much not a national project. A museum devoted to the history of America’s wars that included the vicious war the United States fought against guerrillas in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902 (expertly excoriated by Mark Twain), and that fairly presented the arguments for and against using the atomic bomb in 1945 on the Japanese cities, with photographic evidence that showed what those weapons did, would be regarded – now more than ever – as a most unpatriotic endeavor."
"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. And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse.
People don’t become inured to what they are shown – if that’s the right way to describe what happens – because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. But if we consider what emotions would be desirable, it seems too simple to elect sympathy. The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers – seen close-up on the television screen – and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. 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 an 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."
"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 – that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of ‘the modern’, and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality."
"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."
"Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us – grandparents, parents, teachers and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another."
"A stepped-up recognition of the monstrousness of the slave system that once existed, unquestioned by most, in the United States is a national project of recent decades that many Euro-Americans feel some tug of obligation to join. This ongoing project is a great achievement, a benchmark of civic virtue. The acknowledgment of the American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in violation of one of the cardinal laws of war) is very much not a national project. A museum devoted to the history of America’s wars that included the vicious war the United States fought against guerrillas in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902 (expertly excoriated by Mark Twain), and that fairly presented the arguments for and against using the atomic bomb in 1945 on the Japanese cities, with photographic evidence that showed what those weapons did, would be regarded – now more than ever – as a most unpatriotic endeavor."
"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. And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse.
People don’t become inured to what they are shown – if that’s the right way to describe what happens – because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. But if we consider what emotions would be desirable, it seems too simple to elect sympathy. The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers – seen close-up on the television screen – and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. 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 an 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."
"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 – that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of ‘the modern’, and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality."
October 20, 2021
I was going to give this borderline self-indulgent rant two stars until Sontag hissed at the Frenchies for how unbelievably provincialist society of spectacle is; how classist; how much a sign of dubious privilege; and how the third world doesn't have the luxury to patronise reality. I was going to give it two stars until Sontag cleared the fog around how if we could do something about what the atrocity images show, we might not care as much about the moralising issues that atrocity photography presents.
Anyway, overall I didn't care for this; it was mostly a waste of my fucking time. You might find it more worthwhile if you've read On Photography. But you might also be a privileged, pretentious parasite if you claim, as a millennial or a zoomer in the twenty-first century, that anything Sontag wrote on Images and Photography rewired your brain and made you hold your camera differently. Sontag agrees with me. So, there's that anyway.
(Man, this is the third book that I've picked up this month thinking it would be sexy enough to talk about empathy and care ethics, based on its title. But nope!)
Anyway, overall I didn't care for this; it was mostly a waste of my fucking time. You might find it more worthwhile if you've read On Photography. But you might also be a privileged, pretentious parasite if you claim, as a millennial or a zoomer in the twenty-first century, that anything Sontag wrote on Images and Photography rewired your brain and made you hold your camera differently. Sontag agrees with me. So, there's that anyway.
(Man, this is the third book that I've picked up this month thinking it would be sexy enough to talk about empathy and care ethics, based on its title. But nope!)
October 22, 2017
Quiero leer TODO lo que ha escrito esta mujer. FAN.
October 22, 2019
پیشنوشت: این کتاب از جهات زیادی برای من خوشایند بود از مقدمه و تضمینهاش از کتاب سهگینی وولف گرفته تا کلمات برندهی سانتاگ خطاب به عقل سلیم و عرف. کتاب نقدی به نگاه معمول به جنگه با کمک گرفتن از عکاسی جنگ. در واقع نگاه ضدجنگ سانتاگ در قالب بررسی عکاسی جنگ بسط پبدا میکنه و بحث رو جلو میبره
مشکلی که با کتاب داشتم مقدمهای بود که از جانب خشایار دیهیمی به عنوان سرپرست این مجموعه نوشته شده بود به نظرم این بخش فوقالعاده سطحی و دمدستی و عامهپسند نوشته شده بود و ضمنا ویراستاری و بخشهای از ترجمه هم کمی توی ذوقم زد.
اما در مجموع با کتاب خیلی حال کردم و توصیه میکنم شما هم بخونیدش
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عکسها میگویند ببینید، جنگ این شکلی است. این کاری است که جنگ میکند و آن، آن هم حاصل جنگ است. جنگ میدراند، میگسلاند، جنگ سلاخی میکند و دل و رودهها را بیرون میکشد. جنگ میسوزاند. جنگ تکهتکه میکند. جنگ ویران میکند
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آندره برتون میگوید: زیبایی یا تکاندهنده است یا اصلا وجود ندارد. او این آرمان زیباشناختی را سوررئالیست؟ (سوررئالیسم!!) نامید، اما در فرهنگی که استیلای ارزشهای سوداگرانه از بنیان بازسازیاش کرده، صحبت از لزوم تکاندهنده بودن نمایشی بودن و بهتآور بودنِ تصاویر به نظر یکی از اصولِ پایهای واقعنگری و شم خوبی در کارهای تجاری است. مگر جز این راهی برای جلب توجه به سمتِ محصول یا هنرمان وجود دارد؟ وقتی افراد بیوقفه در معر تاویرند و برخی از آنها را هم بیش از اندازه وو بارها از نظر میگدرانند، مگر جز این راهی برای به جا گذاشتن اثر و تاثیری از خود وجود دارد؟ تصویر به مثابهی تکانه و تصویر به مابهی کلیشه دو رویِ یک سکهاند
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هنری جیمز، همان استاد خبرهای که واقعیت را با ظرافت در لفافهی کلمات میپوشاند و با اطنابش در کلام جادو میکرد، به نیویورک تایمز گفت: در بحبوحهی تمامِ این جریانها به زبان آوردنِ کلمات همانقدر دشوار است که تاب آوردنِ اندیشهها. جنگ چیزی از کلمات بای نگذاشته؛ کلمات رنگ و رویشان را از دست دادهاند، تباه شدهاند
____________________________________________________________آنجا که وولف میگوید یکی از عکسهایی که به دستشش رسیده جسدِ مرد یا زنی را نشان میدهد که آنقدر تکهپاره شده که بیشباهت به لاشهی یک خوک نیست، منظورش این است که مقیاسِ سبعیتِ جنگ آنچه را به مردم فردیت داده از بین میبرد،حتی انسانیت آنان را هم. که البته این ننمای جنگ است وقتی که از دور، چون یک تصویر، به آن نگاه میکنیم
قربانیان، بستگانِ سوگوار و مصرفکنندگان خبرها همه نزدیکی و دوریِ خاصِ خودشان را از جنگ دارند. ریحترین بازنمایی]ا از جنگ، و از پیکرهایی که در فجایع آسیب دیدهاند، آنهایی هستند که بیگانهتر به نر میرسند و درنتیجه احتمال شناخته شدنشان بسیار کمتر است. وقتی سوژه به خودیها تعلق داشته باشد، از عکاس انتظار دارند محتاطانهتر عمل کند
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زندگانی که در برادوی ازدحام میکنند شاید کمتر به یاد مردگانِ انتیتام باشند، اما تصور میکنیم اگر چند تن از این اجساد غرق در خون را که تازه از میدان نبرد آوردهاند کنارِ پیادهرو روی زمین بخوابانند، این جماعت دیگر به این بیمبالاتی راهش را در چنین گذرگاهِ عریضی در پیش نگیرد و با این خیال آسوده در آن گردش نکند. چهرهها را خواهند پوشاند و بادقت و احتیاط بیشتر راهشان را کج خواهند کرد
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لئونتیوس در مسیرش از پیرائیوس به دیوارِ شمالی نرسیده بود که دیدهآش به اجساد چند مجرم میافتد که روی زمین افتادهاند و میرغغضبی هم در کنارشان ایستاد. دلش میخواهد برود و نظارهشان کند اما در عینحال نیز حسِ بیزاری در وجودش موج میزند و سعی میکند از آنجا دور شود. متی با خودش کلنجار میرود و چشمانش را با دست میپوشاند اما سرانجام میل درونش بر وی چیره میگردد با چشمانی تمامباز و گشوده به سوی اجساد میدود و فریاد میزند: این هم از این، نفرین برشما، محظوظ شوید در منظرهای چنان دلاویز
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یکی از بزرگترین نظریهپردازان امر اروتیک، ژرژ باتای، عکسی را روی میزش گذاشته بود از یک زندانی در 1910 در چین که مراسم «مرگ هزار زخم» را بر رویش انجام میدادهاند. عکس را طوری قرار داده بود که هر روز بتواند نگاهش کند (این عکس مشهور در آخرین کتابی که در سالهای زندگیِ باتای از وی به چاپ رسید، اشکهای اروس در 1961، به چشم میخورد( باتای مینویسد: این عکس نقش بیچون و چرایی در زندگیِ من داشته. مدام محو و دلمشغولِ این تصویرِ درد بودهام، که همزمان خلسهای است و غیرقابل تحمل. به گفتهی باتای، تعمق در این تصویر هم کشتنِ احساسات است و هم رهایی شناخت اروتیک ممنوعه ـ واکنش پیچیدهای که برای خیلیها به دشواری پذیرفتنی است. بیشتر افراد این تصویر را صرفا غیرقابل تحمل میدانند: شخص بریدهدستی که در قربانگاهِ چندین تیغ و چاقوی مشغول به کار قرار گرفته و در مراحل مرگبارِ کنده شدن پوستش است ـ این عکس است، نه نقاشی؛ یک مارسیاس زنده است نه یک افسانه ـ و هنوز در این عکس جان در بدن دارد و در صورت رو به آشمانش همان خلسهای پیداست که در چهرهی تمام سباستینهای قدیس در نقاشی رنسانس ایتالیا دیده میشد. تصویر قساوتها وقتی مووع تعمق قرار میگیرند میتوانند پاسخگوی چند نیاز متفاوت باشند، نیاز به زرهی پولادین در برابرِ ضعفها، نیاز به بیحسیِ بیشتر، نیاز به پذیرش وجود امو اصللاحنشدنی
حرف باتای این نیست که با دیدن چنین صحنهی طاقتفرسایی کسبِ لذت میکند.او میگوید میتواند درد و رنجی عظیم را نه فقط در حدِ رنج که در حد یک نوع استعلا تصور کند. این دید نسبت به رنجها، نسبت به درد دیگری، ریشه در تفکر دینی دارد که درد را به جانفشانی و آن را هم به تعالی پیوند میزند ـ دیدی کاملا بیگانه با درکِ مدرن که رنج را نوعی اشتباه یا تصادف یا جنایت قلمداد میکند. چیزی که باید درستش کرد. باید از آن دوری کرد. چیزی که به آدم حس ناتوانی میدهد
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خو گرفتنِ مردم به چیزهایی که نشانشان داده میشود ـ البته اگر این واژه برای توصیفِ اتفاقی که رخ میدهد درست باشد ـ به خاطر کمیت تصاویری نیست که بر سر و رویشان میبارد. انفعال باعث کمرنگ شدن احساسات میشود حالتهای روحی که با عنوان بیعلاقگی، بیحسی اخلاقی یا عاطفی از آنها یاد میشود مملو از احساسات هستند، احساساتی سرشار از خشم و کلافگی
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این بخشی از نوشتههای بودلر است در یادداشتهای روزانهاش که به دههی 1860 برمیگردد:
امکان ندارد روزنامهای را به دست گیری و فارغ از آنکه مربوط به چه روز و چه ماه و چه سالی است در خط به خط آن هولناکترین نشانههای گمراهی بشر را نیابی... هر روزنامهای از آن سر نخست تا آخرینش چیزی نیست مگر کاغذی انباشته از رویدادهای هولناک. جنگها، جنایتها، سرقتها، شهوترانیها، شکنجهها، کردارهای اهریمنیِ شاهان و ملتها و فرد فردِ مردم؛ ضیافتی است که انسان متمدن وعدهی صبحگاهاش را فرو میبرد
مشکلی که با کتاب داشتم مقدمهای بود که از جانب خشایار دیهیمی به عنوان سرپرست این مجموعه نوشته شده بود به نظرم این بخش فوقالعاده سطحی و دمدستی و عامهپسند نوشته شده بود و ضمنا ویراستاری و بخشهای از ترجمه هم کمی توی ذوقم زد.
اما در مجموع با کتاب خیلی حال کردم و توصیه میکنم شما هم بخونیدش
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عکسها میگویند ببینید، جنگ این شکلی است. این کاری است که جنگ میکند و آن، آن هم حاصل جنگ است. جنگ میدراند، میگسلاند، جنگ سلاخی میکند و دل و رودهها را بیرون میکشد. جنگ میسوزاند. جنگ تکهتکه میکند. جنگ ویران میکند
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آندره برتون میگوید: زیبایی یا تکاندهنده است یا اصلا وجود ندارد. او این آرمان زیباشناختی را سوررئالیست؟ (سوررئالیسم!!) نامید، اما در فرهنگی که استیلای ارزشهای سوداگرانه از بنیان بازسازیاش کرده، صحبت از لزوم تکاندهنده بودن نمایشی بودن و بهتآور بودنِ تصاویر به نظر یکی از اصولِ پایهای واقعنگری و شم خوبی در کارهای تجاری است. مگر جز این راهی برای جلب توجه به سمتِ محصول یا هنرمان وجود دارد؟ وقتی افراد بیوقفه در معر تاویرند و برخی از آنها را هم بیش از اندازه وو بارها از نظر میگدرانند، مگر جز این راهی برای به جا گذاشتن اثر و تاثیری از خود وجود دارد؟ تصویر به مثابهی تکانه و تصویر به مابهی کلیشه دو رویِ یک سکهاند
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هنری جیمز، همان استاد خبرهای که واقعیت را با ظرافت در لفافهی کلمات میپوشاند و با اطنابش در کلام جادو میکرد، به نیویورک تایمز گفت: در بحبوحهی تمامِ این جریانها به زبان آوردنِ کلمات همانقدر دشوار است که تاب آوردنِ اندیشهها. جنگ چیزی از کلمات بای نگذاشته؛ کلمات رنگ و رویشان را از دست دادهاند، تباه شدهاند
____________________________________________________________آنجا که وولف میگوید یکی از عکسهایی که به دستشش رسیده جسدِ مرد یا زنی را نشان میدهد که آنقدر تکهپاره شده که بیشباهت به لاشهی یک خوک نیست، منظورش این است که مقیاسِ سبعیتِ جنگ آنچه را به مردم فردیت داده از بین میبرد،حتی انسانیت آنان را هم. که البته این ننمای جنگ است وقتی که از دور، چون یک تصویر، به آن نگاه میکنیم
قربانیان، بستگانِ سوگوار و مصرفکنندگان خبرها همه نزدیکی و دوریِ خاصِ خودشان را از جنگ دارند. ریحترین بازنمایی]ا از جنگ، و از پیکرهایی که در فجایع آسیب دیدهاند، آنهایی هستند که بیگانهتر به نر میرسند و درنتیجه احتمال شناخته شدنشان بسیار کمتر است. وقتی سوژه به خودیها تعلق داشته باشد، از عکاس انتظار دارند محتاطانهتر عمل کند
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زندگانی که در برادوی ازدحام میکنند شاید کمتر به یاد مردگانِ انتیتام باشند، اما تصور میکنیم اگر چند تن از این اجساد غرق در خون را که تازه از میدان نبرد آوردهاند کنارِ پیادهرو روی زمین بخوابانند، این جماعت دیگر به این بیمبالاتی راهش را در چنین گذرگاهِ عریضی در پیش نگیرد و با این خیال آسوده در آن گردش نکند. چهرهها را خواهند پوشاند و بادقت و احتیاط بیشتر راهشان را کج خواهند کرد
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لئونتیوس در مسیرش از پیرائیوس به دیوارِ شمالی نرسیده بود که دیدهآش به اجساد چند مجرم میافتد که روی زمین افتادهاند و میرغغضبی هم در کنارشان ایستاد. دلش میخواهد برود و نظارهشان کند اما در عینحال نیز حسِ بیزاری در وجودش موج میزند و سعی میکند از آنجا دور شود. متی با خودش کلنجار میرود و چشمانش را با دست میپوشاند اما سرانجام میل درونش بر وی چیره میگردد با چشمانی تمامباز و گشوده به سوی اجساد میدود و فریاد میزند: این هم از این، نفرین برشما، محظوظ شوید در منظرهای چنان دلاویز
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یکی از بزرگترین نظریهپردازان امر اروتیک، ژرژ باتای، عکسی را روی میزش گذاشته بود از یک زندانی در 1910 در چین که مراسم «مرگ هزار زخم» را بر رویش انجام میدادهاند. عکس را طوری قرار داده بود که هر روز بتواند نگاهش کند (این عکس مشهور در آخرین کتابی که در سالهای زندگیِ باتای از وی به چاپ رسید، اشکهای اروس در 1961، به چشم میخورد( باتای مینویسد: این عکس نقش بیچون و چرایی در زندگیِ من داشته. مدام محو و دلمشغولِ این تصویرِ درد بودهام، که همزمان خلسهای است و غیرقابل تحمل. به گفتهی باتای، تعمق در این تصویر هم کشتنِ احساسات است و هم رهایی شناخت اروتیک ممنوعه ـ واکنش پیچیدهای که برای خیلیها به دشواری پذیرفتنی است. بیشتر افراد این تصویر را صرفا غیرقابل تحمل میدانند: شخص بریدهدستی که در قربانگاهِ چندین تیغ و چاقوی مشغول به کار قرار گرفته و در مراحل مرگبارِ کنده شدن پوستش است ـ این عکس است، نه نقاشی؛ یک مارسیاس زنده است نه یک افسانه ـ و هنوز در این عکس جان در بدن دارد و در صورت رو به آشمانش همان خلسهای پیداست که در چهرهی تمام سباستینهای قدیس در نقاشی رنسانس ایتالیا دیده میشد. تصویر قساوتها وقتی مووع تعمق قرار میگیرند میتوانند پاسخگوی چند نیاز متفاوت باشند، نیاز به زرهی پولادین در برابرِ ضعفها، نیاز به بیحسیِ بیشتر، نیاز به پذیرش وجود امو اصللاحنشدنی
حرف باتای این نیست که با دیدن چنین صحنهی طاقتفرسایی کسبِ لذت میکند.او میگوید میتواند درد و رنجی عظیم را نه فقط در حدِ رنج که در حد یک نوع استعلا تصور کند. این دید نسبت به رنجها، نسبت به درد دیگری، ریشه در تفکر دینی دارد که درد را به جانفشانی و آن را هم به تعالی پیوند میزند ـ دیدی کاملا بیگانه با درکِ مدرن که رنج را نوعی اشتباه یا تصادف یا جنایت قلمداد میکند. چیزی که باید درستش کرد. باید از آن دوری کرد. چیزی که به آدم حس ناتوانی میدهد
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خو گرفتنِ مردم به چیزهایی که نشانشان داده میشود ـ البته اگر این واژه برای توصیفِ اتفاقی که رخ میدهد درست باشد ـ به خاطر کمیت تصاویری نیست که بر سر و رویشان میبارد. انفعال باعث کمرنگ شدن احساسات میشود حالتهای روحی که با عنوان بیعلاقگی، بیحسی اخلاقی یا عاطفی از آنها یاد میشود مملو از احساسات هستند، احساساتی سرشار از خشم و کلافگی
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این بخشی از نوشتههای بودلر است در یادداشتهای روزانهاش که به دههی 1860 برمیگردد:
امکان ندارد روزنامهای را به دست گیری و فارغ از آنکه مربوط به چه روز و چه ماه و چه سالی است در خط به خط آن هولناکترین نشانههای گمراهی بشر را نیابی... هر روزنامهای از آن سر نخست تا آخرینش چیزی نیست مگر کاغذی انباشته از رویدادهای هولناک. جنگها، جنایتها، سرقتها، شهوترانیها، شکنجهها، کردارهای اهریمنیِ شاهان و ملتها و فرد فردِ مردم؛ ضیافتی است که انسان متمدن وعدهی صبحگاهاش را فرو میبرد
July 17, 2025
همیشه از خوندن دربارهٔ جنگ فراری بودم. این کتاب رو پارسال گرفتم، چون سانتاگ نوشته بود و دربارهٔ عکسها بود.چندبار شروعش کردم ولی بعد یک خوندن پاراگراف و نگاه انداختن به عکسای آخر کتاب، ادامه ندادم.
در نهایت دیدم که ایزوله کردن خودت هیچ تأثیری نداره خاورمیانهای بدبخت.
خب، من کلاً سانتاگ رو دوست دارم؛ تأملش در عکسها رو بیشتر. شیفتهٔ اینم که جنسیت، اخلاق و زیباییشناسی رو میبره زیر ذرهبین.
توی این مجموعه جستار هم مخصوصاً بخش زیباییشناسیش رو دوست داشتم. زیبایی و جنگ؟ جل الخالق!
جایی هم به این اشاره کرد که نظرش نسبت به فلان نوشتهٔ کتاب «دربارهٔ عکاسی» عوض شده. یادمه قبل اینکه اصلاً چیزی از سانتاگ بخونم، یه مصاحبه ازش دیده بودم که میگفت نمیترسه از نظرش برگرده و تغییر دیدگاه رو نشانهٔ رشد میدونه. از همون موقع برام خیلی محترم شد و هنوز هم همون احترام رو براش قائلم.
ترجمهٔ احسان کیانیخواه خوبه. از ریویوها فهمیدم که احتمالاً بهتر از ترجمهٔ چشمهست.
ممنون که خوندید.💙
۲۶ تیر ۱۴۰۴
اتاق
در نهایت دیدم که ایزوله کردن خودت هیچ تأثیری نداره خاورمیانهای بدبخت.
خب، من کلاً سانتاگ رو دوست دارم؛ تأملش در عکسها رو بیشتر. شیفتهٔ اینم که جنسیت، اخلاق و زیباییشناسی رو میبره زیر ذرهبین.
توی این مجموعه جستار هم مخصوصاً بخش زیباییشناسیش رو دوست داشتم. زیبایی و جنگ؟ جل الخالق!
جایی هم به این اشاره کرد که نظرش نسبت به فلان نوشتهٔ کتاب «دربارهٔ عکاسی» عوض شده. یادمه قبل اینکه اصلاً چیزی از سانتاگ بخونم، یه مصاحبه ازش دیده بودم که میگفت نمیترسه از نظرش برگرده و تغییر دیدگاه رو نشانهٔ رشد میدونه. از همون موقع برام خیلی محترم شد و هنوز هم همون احترام رو براش قائلم.
ترجمهٔ احسان کیانیخواه خوبه. از ریویوها فهمیدم که احتمالاً بهتر از ترجمهٔ چشمهست.
ممنون که خوندید.💙
۲۶ تیر ۱۴۰۴
اتاق
August 27, 2013
سوزان سونتاج مفكرة أمريكية وروائية وباحثة فى مختلف الفنون ولها أبحاث متعلقة بالتصوير الفوتوغرافى كهذا الكتاب الذى يتحدث عن علاقة التصوير الفوتوغرافى بالحروب والثورات وتتحدث عن استغلال الصور أيديولوجيا للتأثير فى المشاهد بنوع من الشفقة او التعاطف..هذا التعاطف الذى مع تكرره يتحول إلى فعل ملول يتتبعه نوع من اللامبالاه للذى يحدث طالما هو بعيد عن منطقة وجودنا جغرافيا. تتحدث أيضا عن استغلال التصوير عنصريا والطرق التى تتبعها الدول فى القمع على وسائل الاعلام تحديدا التصوير فى تبنيها فكرة المنشور والمتغاضى عنه والمتوارى...تتحدث كذلك عن مصورين فوتوغرافيين مشهورين وتتحدث عن الصلة التاريخية بين التصوير والحرب وفلسفة الصورة فى اظهار الألم الانسانى
هذا الكتاب وثيقة عن اهم الفنون المعاصرة تأثيرا من بداية نشأته وصلته اللصيقة بالحروب كفعل انسانى لم يتوقف من بداية البشرية وكأنه هو الفعل القاعدة وغيره الاستثناء
الكتاب فيه من البشاعة لذوى القلوب المرهفة، حيث أنها تصور مجازر وحروب وأشلاء بشرية وكأنك تراها عيانا
يمكنكم مشاهدة هذا الفيلم القصير
Night and Fog (1955) by Alain Resnais
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048434/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8qTFu...
هذا الكتاب وثيقة عن اهم الفنون المعاصرة تأثيرا من بداية نشأته وصلته اللصيقة بالحروب كفعل انسانى لم يتوقف من بداية البشرية وكأنه هو الفعل القاعدة وغيره الاستثناء
الكتاب فيه من البشاعة لذوى القلوب المرهفة، حيث أنها تصور مجازر وحروب وأشلاء بشرية وكأنك تراها عيانا
يمكنكم مشاهدة هذا الفيلم القصير
Night and Fog (1955) by Alain Resnais
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048434/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8qTFu...
January 17, 2024
There are two ways you can read Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’.
You can either just straightforward read the essay, which is extremely well thought out and presented, so that would certainly be enough.
Or, you can read it sitting next to Google, and actually look up the images/artwork/photographs that Sontag refers to. I chose this option.
If you pick this second option then you’ll very soon understand perhaps why these images are not included with the essay.
In fact, there is one particular image which she refers to, reproduced in George Bataille’s ‘The Tears of Eros’, which I personally found so disturbing that I genuinely, genuinely wish I had not looked it up. (You’ve been warned.)
Great essay, but in hindsight I’m not sure I recommend the Googling! Some of it really is deeply disturbing.
You can either just straightforward read the essay, which is extremely well thought out and presented, so that would certainly be enough.
Or, you can read it sitting next to Google, and actually look up the images/artwork/photographs that Sontag refers to. I chose this option.
If you pick this second option then you’ll very soon understand perhaps why these images are not included with the essay.
In fact, there is one particular image which she refers to, reproduced in George Bataille’s ‘The Tears of Eros’, which I personally found so disturbing that I genuinely, genuinely wish I had not looked it up. (You’ve been warned.)
Great essay, but in hindsight I’m not sure I recommend the Googling! Some of it really is deeply disturbing.
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