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Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag

4.06 · Rating details · 11,871 ratings · 831 reviews

Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today. How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newspapers) affect us? Are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty?

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag takes a fresh ...more

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Paperback, 117 pages

Published August 26th 2004 by Penguin (first published January 7th 2003)

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May 04, 2014 Trevor rated it really liked it

Shelves: social-theory, photography

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 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.
...more

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May 07, 2019 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: recs, 2019

A brilliant expansion and revision of On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others argues for approaching images of suffering only as invitations to consider the origins and impact of social inequality. Drawing attention to how photography is always both art and testimony, Sontag convincingly deconstructs the idea that a photo of pain by itself can reveal anything universal or self evident about oppression, historical or ongoing. The author then claims that, even if photos of suffering can’t act ...more

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May 22, 2018 Jennifer (Insert Lit Pun) added it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

A 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 b ...more

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Oct 02, 2016 Rakhi Dalal rated it really liked it

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 Cart ...more

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Mar 17, 2019 Steven Godin rated it really liked it

Shelves: essays, america-canada, non-fiction

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 suppos ...more

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Feb 16, 2020 Raul Bimenyimana rated it really liked it

Shelves: women-writers

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 ...more

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Feb 08, 2012 Riku Sayuj rated it liked it

Shelves: insti-crit, philosophy, war

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 he
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.

...more

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Jul 03, 2007 Irina Dumitrescu rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dissertation

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-provo ...more

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Jan 11, 2015 Zanna rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2015year-reading-women

Sontag opens here with a critique of Virginia Woolf's comments on photographs from war in Three Guineas. While Woolf begins by making a feminist distinction between her perspective from that of a real or imagined male lawyer, she enters a 'we' with him in the face of the photographs; photographs of the victims of war, Sontag writes 'create the illusion of consensus'. Sontag's aim here is to (re)problematise the 'we' Woolf accepts, as well as to restore what is lost in the limited reading she mak Sontag opens here with a critique of Virginia Woolf's comments on photographs from war in Three Guineas. While Woolf begins by making a feminist distinction between her perspective from that of a real or imagined male lawyer, she enters a 'we' with him in the face of the photographs; photographs of the victims of war, Sontag writes 'create the illusion of consensus'. Sontag's aim here is to (re)problematise the 'we' Woolf accepts, as well as to restore what is lost in the limited reading she makes: to read 'only what confirms an abhorrence of war' in these pictures, is to 'dismiss politics' and history.

This essay reminds us that photographs have context: authors, victims, viewers are caught in a web of circumstances, intentions and connections that determine their reach, reading and effects. Sontag urges us to think about what it means to look at pictures of others' suffering, about the political situation that brings them to our notice, since whose suffering can be seen is a matter of policy

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying. Thus postcolonial Africa exists in the consciousness of the general public in the rich world—besides through its sexy music—mainly as a succession of unforgettable photographs of large-eyed victims, starting with figures in the famine lands of Biafra in the late 1960s to the survivors of the genocide of nearly a million Rwandan Tutsis in 1994 and, a few years later, the children and adults whose limbs were hacked off during the program of mass terror conducted by the RUF, the rebel forces in Sierra Leone. (More recently, the photographs are of whole families of indigent villagers dying of AIDS.) These sights carry a double message. They show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward—that is, poor—parts of the world.

Sontag relates this to the history of displaying colonised human bodies as 'zoo animals'. This history is also exposed as part of the related critique articulated by Black Usian writers of the sharing on social media of images showing Black Usians murdered by police, which Trudy of Gradient Lair calls 'the consumption of Black death'. Sontag points out that 'sympathy proclaims innocence' – I can feel or profess to feel for pictured victims and forget that my privilege may be an effect of their oppression. The US has a Holocaust Museum, but no museum of the history of slavery, which, Sontag suggests, might precipitate radical responses. Her concluding point, that we cannot ever understand the experience of war through the consumption of images, leads into the criticism my brother insightfully made of The Hunger Games. We have no idea how this feels, so isn't its transformation into the dramatic collateral damage of an elaborate character development... problematic? Like Trudy's essays, this point goes beyond Sontag's critique, which discusses the enjoyment of gruesome images, but not so much their uses as products under capitalism. Nonetheless, I think Sontag makes some effective challenges in this useful essay.

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 hidierto 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."

...more

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May 02, 2012 Katty rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, books-i-own, human-rights-and-social-issues, non-fiction, 2013, essays, history

A common criticism of Sontag’s writings (as noted in other reviews) is that they’re not discerning enough and frequently pose “What?” or “How?” instead of being decisive and affirming. I actually believe this is a strength utilized in her essays. Many of the ideas aren’t fully developed or entirely convincing, but that can be useful for reflection and stimulate discussion. I always find myself thinking about her points more than I do with other writers.

Sontag mainly speaks about photography and A common criticism of Sontag’s writings (as noted in other reviews) is that they’re not discerning enough and frequently pose “What?” or “How?” instead of being decisive and affirming. I actually believe this is a strength utilized in her essays. Many of the ideas aren’t fully developed or entirely convincing, but that can be useful for reflection and stimulate discussion. I always find myself thinking about her points more than I do with other writers.

Sontag mainly speaks about photography and asks a lot about its identity. People desire a raw, real quality in photographs displaying atrocity instead of an artistic angle – photographs are supposed to show complete truth instead of evoking particular feelings. In the case of photographs showing suffering, they’re meant to be sobering, not aesthetic. At the same time, we wish to be allured by the spectacle. Photographs also depict specific scenes, excluding those not chosen by the photographer, which designate what the viewer is privy to. Some well-known photographs from the past were even staged in order to depict an image with just the right dramatic effect.

She mentions how communities determine the meaning of a photograph, not the photographer, and that we choose whether or not we have a use for it. This use (or not use) is also determined by a specific community. A society dictates what we chose to acknowledge and consider. She remarks that memory of war is often local and sometimes only relevant to the places affected by it, especially in cases of genocide or civil war. In order for a war to garner international attention, it has to be more prominent than these “smaller” atrocities. These wars are a deep part of a nation’s history, often leaving lingering pain, but who pays attention other than those who experienced it firsthand?

One conceptual point I thought she made was how the knowledge of suffering makes those detached from it more aware yet creates an abstract, distant image of that suffering. This generates hopeless speculation and feelings of frustration and guilt. She poses the question of whether or not we’d care as much if we could actually do something – if we weren’t far away and felt we could help rectify the suffering, would we feel as bad when watching? But watching the images up close as they unfold would still just be watching, not necessarily acting.

One thing I noticed while reading Regarding the Pain of Others was its striking similarity to On Photography. It almost reads like an abridged version. On one hand, I wish Sontag had gone further with new ideas. They seemed to be there, but she didn’t explore those topics as much as I would have liked. Despite that, in a way this is stronger than On Photography because her points are more concise, straightforward, and not as repetitive. It did resemble her previous work, for better and worse.
...more

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Mar 28, 2020 Pablo Hernandez rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-read-in-2020

"To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude".

A splendid analysis of suffering and pain as depicted by photography within our 'society of spectacle', written with Sontag's usual lucidity, and just as eye-opening as On Photography, published thirty years prior. ...more

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Mar 18, 2020 tee rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020, essays, america, women, philosophy

this is such a fantastic, powerful essay that it truly is a pity how it suffers from (a) a very diffused telling, so much so that the chapter categorizations seem rushed through, and (b) the lack of visual?? for a book that deals with how 'war-making and picture-taking are congruent activities,' and brings into study so many historical photographic representations, it's not very understandable to me how leaving out the photographs themselves contributes to 'both objective record and personal tes ...more

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Dec 28, 2020 Hadrian rated it really liked it

Shelves: visual-arts, nonfiction, essays, philosophy

The question turns on a view of the principal medium of the news, television. An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are by definition images of which, sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has its origin in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images.

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Jul 25, 2016 Mohammed Yusuf rated it really liked it

تحكي سونتاغ عن الصورة والتي تعطي المعنى الموضوعي وبالحين نفسه تعبر الى العاطفة التي تطرح المعنى وتفسره وهذا ما لا يقدر عليه سواها
الصورة هنا متعلقة بالحرب وممارستها للتجديدية في هذا المعنى فصورة المجازر في كل مرة هي كأول مرة متجددة ومتجزرة في معنى الصراع ، وضع الصورة ومعناها لتقريب البعيد عن الحرب اليها والمساهمة برفضها وبالحين نفسه توليد شفقة غير فاعلة تقود الى لا مبالاة في قمة السخرية ، وطبيعة المشاركة التي تقوم بها الصورة واخلاقيتها ، و هي اذ تذكر ذلك وغيره تقف موقف توضيح وتبيين لا غير ، ولا ...more

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Dec 23, 2019 Emma Angeline rated it really liked it

An engaging essay on the photography of suffering: what can we photograph, what should we, do we have a duty, when does it become voyeurism or exploitative, when is it reference, do we become numb to seeing atrocities in a world where were bombarded with information and can you make people care. Worth the read

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Sep 23, 2013 Jimmy rated it really liked it

Shelves: female, non-fiction, year-2000s, and-a-half-stars

I've been thinking along these lines for some time now. Probably we all have. A lot of these ideas are not new. But it's nice to see them explored, thought over despite having been thought over already. Sontag does not give us easy answers, because the act of looking at other people's pain is uncomfortable, and probably should always be uncomfortable. No amount of essaying about it should take that uncomfortableness away. However, while words will often cause us to think, photos of war and viole I've been thinking along these lines for some time now. Probably we all have. A lot of these ideas are not new. But it's nice to see them explored, thought over despite having been thought over already. Sontag does not give us easy answers, because the act of looking at other people's pain is uncomfortable, and probably should always be uncomfortable. No amount of essaying about it should take that uncomfortableness away. However, while words will often cause us to think, photos of war and violence will instead shock us in a more immediate-visceral way into one of our automatic reaction-boxes: apathy-because-overwhelmed, sympathy-therefore-unimplicated, shock-cum-desensitization, outrage-leading-to-action, strangely-attracted-yet-disgusted-slash-shamed-by-shades-of-voyeurism, that's just a SMALL sampling of the many-many possible-boxes of innumerable conflicted emotions an image can bring about. But the positives of an image (immediate/visceral/emotional) can also be negatives (can be taken out of context, used for political purposes, rarely asks the viewer to engage on deeper level, i.e. find out who they're actually looking at, the backstory, etc.) I recently read a good article about a now semi-famous photo of a 9/11 jumper: http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ09...

The photo is sleek, professional, of a man who had decided to jump from the WTC instead of burning to death. He is going down head first, in a deceptively peaceful dive, the tower's geometry as his backdrop. The article was partially about the process of trying to figure out who this falling man was. But reading the article I was quite puzzled at some of the reactions from people. Some wanted the photo never to be shown in order to respect the dead--Sontag talks about this, though not this exact photo, but about the idea of respecting the dead, which oddly does not extend to photos of other cultures, Vietnam for instance. But compare this to Emmett Till's mother, who wanted an open casket so that the world can see the injustice. This reaction is more understandable to me. This idea of respect does have its logic though, which mostly applies only with images, because as Sontag says "there is no way to guarantee reverential conditions in which to look at these pictures and be fully responsive to them." Once it's out there, it can be looked-at in any number of ways. There is no way that a photographer or a family member of the victims can control this after it is released.

This is another thing I can never understand: and that shocked me about the article: how so many families refused to look at the photo, or if they did look at it, looked immediately for evidence that it was not their family member. They did not want to think of their father/brother/son as the person who "gave up hope" by jumping... or who "abandoned" them: "He had a sister. He never would have left her alone." This was inexplicable for me, as there was no hope to begin with, when a building is already burning down/collapsing, but only a symbol of hope. The idea of staying the course is a purely symbolic and futile act--and would anyone call these victims cowards or blame them just because they chose the less painful route out? ...more

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Feb 11, 2009 Ben rated it liked it

The book is disappointingly diffuse and lacking in incisiveness. This probably reflects Sontag's ambivalence about how she is supposed to react to images of death and destruction. But such ambivalence doesn't make for compelling reading, especially since the themes which she explores (e.g., the suspicious claim to objectivity of photography, voyeurism/complicity masquerading as disinterestedness in the viewer) will be familiar to anybody who has reflected on the subject.

So perhaps its value lie ...more

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Aug 15, 2016 Eadweard rated it really liked it

Shelves: essays, non-fiction, non-fiction-read

" “No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain,” " ...more

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Dec 22, 2017 thehalcyondaysofsummer rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Opening lines: ‘In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war.’

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Jul 17, 2010 Wolfram rated it really liked it

One of the great theorists of the erotic, Georges Bataille, kept a photograph taken in China in 1910 of a prisoner undergoing “the death of a hundred cuts” on his desk, where he could look at it every day. (Since becoming legendary, it is reproduced in the last of Bataille’s books published during his lifetime, in 1961, Les Armes d’Eros (The Tears of Eros)). “This photograph,” Bataille wrote, “had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same ...more

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Apr 07, 2020 Tatsuhiro Sato rated it really liked it

4 🌟

This is my first read from Susan Sontag works and would surely read other of her works.

This book is about war, violence, deaths, history, peace & our civilization and connecting all these dots are the photographs of different point of times in our history, whether it is World wars or rapes in Nanking or Crimean war or of dying soldiers or crying orphans etc. showing how cruel we are as a species, a philosophical, emotional and logical analysis of these photographs.

Also this book also realise ...more

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Aug 30, 2018 Claire Reads Books rated it liked it · review of another edition

3.5 ⭐️ Sontag engages in some interesting intellectual exercises here as she considers our relationship with images of human suffering. Her writing is dense and winding and flirts with academic jargon—but her mastery of language and rhetoric is more impressive than her actual points, which aren’t as novel or complex as they may seem. Good food for thought, for sure, but her argumentation left me wanting more.

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Jan 20, 2012 Antonomasia added it

Shelves: art, politics, read-online, society, paper, 2002-05, psychology, 2015

For years I'd been under the impression this wasn't simply about war photography, instead that it was a work on the whole title topic that used war photography as a starting point. Press articles around the time of release implicitly associated the book and Sontag's cancer, so I thought a lot of it would be philosophy and psychology about ways people respond to someone who is ill, perhaps in different times and societies. That was why I bought it. I also hoped for discussion of the popularity of ...more

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Dec 23, 2014 Jamie rated it liked it

Sontag is characteristically whip smart and eloquent but this text in particular seems (a) to be more a sketch of a long essay than a completed one; (b) suffers from not including the cited photographs; (c) feels like a somewhat tired & less incisive retread of her much better collection On Photography. Worth it for die hards but otherwise a bit too much navel gazing & half formulations for me...

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Mar 10, 2015 David Cerruti rated it really liked it

Shelves: scheduled-2015, 2015-reading-women

Three-star delivery
Five-star content
Food for thought
More than enough to choke on

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Jul 03, 2020 Wuttipol rated it really liked it

"We, don't understand. We don't get it. We can't imagine what it was like...That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right." ...more

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Sep 29, 2018 Dorotea rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction-monographies, art-architecture-etc, read-in-english

A very interesting essay filled with thought-provoking remarks.

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Jan 24, 2021 Simon rated it really liked it

successfully lowered my regard for the pain of others. really like her clean style w lots of history in it.

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Jun 24, 2013 Steven rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy, books-i-own, sociology, psychology, politics, essays, art

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. (13)

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag considers the subject of atrocity photography; of photographs that do

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. (13)

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag considers the subject of atrocity photography; of photographs that document and illustrate other people’s suffering, nowadays ubiquitous and usually of wars fought far away from one’s living room. How should we regard these photographs? What to do with the images of others’ suffering? Is it unforgivable to turn away from them; is sympathizing with their subjects enough? These are the core questions that Sontag raises and brings to the center of discussions on photojournalism (particularly war photography). What is great about this work, I think, is that Sontag – like the images with which she is concerned – gives you no decisive answer or response. Regarding the Pain of Others is a process of reflection; a process of thinking which, in the end, Sontag argues that images of atrocity should instigate. As far as a conclusion goes, this might be it:

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 destitute of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark. (102-103)

It is a rich, compassionate, and appropriately critical work that leaves the reader with plenty to deliberate. It is also a subtle yet powerful anti-war piece (war being, as Sontag reminds us through Woolf, primarily a man’s game).

There is much fascinating information about the history of photojournalism; I found myself searching for many of the photographs, wars, and stories Sontag discusses. There was one problematic issue, however, which concerns Sontag’s claim (on page 56) that the famous raising of the flag on Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945, captured by Joe Rosenthal, turns out to have been a “reconstruction”. I did some research, and all sources point toward a misunderstanding about the photograph: Rosenthal did not stage the raising of the flag.¹ Either Sontag did not know the whole story, which seems doubtful for someone so well-informed on the matter, or else she is using the story loosely (i.e. falsely) to make a point, which is questionable at best.

¹The most extensive and readable account I found of the photograph’s story (and its vindication) is here: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/22/wor...
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Aug 12, 2012 Wanda rated it did not like it

Well, I thought this was going to be about something other than what it is, which is just some thoughts on warporn, deathporn, painporn--things Sontag seems to have an almost necrophiliacly prurient interest in. I never look at this stuff. I don't want to see it. I don't understand people who do; all I know is that they twist themselves into ethical knots trying to justify and give a larger meaning to their nasty little fetish.
I might pay attention to what Sontag wrote if she, herself, had actua ...more

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About Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

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Susan 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 Am Susan 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. ...more

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“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.” — 807 likes

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of 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.” — 140 likes

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