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117 pages, Paperback
First published January 7, 2003
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
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."
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.
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."