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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
read this for class in one day on top of like 70 pages of other reading but very very thought provoking, especially now as we watch a genocide unfold on social media. much to think about.
Might be more very interesting for me specifically than others, with an interest in art history and trying to better understand photography as a medium. I highly recommend for better understanding being surrounded by images of brutality and how to better interact with them.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
“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”
I found this essay by Sontag extremely relevant to today’s society, even though it was written in the early 2000s. I wonder what Sontag would have said about social media in regard to this topic, would have been fascinating to read
I'm about to word vomit.
What does it mean to look at a photograph of another's suffering? Does the voyeuristic aspect outweigh any benefit? While I disagreed with Sontag at times, in the end she holds up a dichotomy I found interesting and nuanced: the photographs as necessary vs the photographs as entirely imperfect. She finishes the book with a point I agree with: that photographs and even witnessing without the medium of photography in the way will never take the place of actual experience. I'm still thinking about her other point, that the pictures are actually necessary, because I feel like her evidence for that was less solid. She writes that it is human nature to turn away from these kinds of photos, and that that's not bad necessarily—but then what is the point of the photos? It gives an imperfect view of suffering; is it a necessary view, anyway? She says that photos should provide a starting point for action, but do photographs actually spur action to the point that the voyeurism is validated? She also brings up the fact that this idea that reality has been subsumed by media and photography is an elite opinion focused only on the first world. I wonder what she would say now if she were alive in 2023 about this. I also really would love an updated Susan Sontag essay on cameraphones. Obviously this will never happen :( I need to reread already, and I just finished this book.
I want to find everything else she's ever written and read it. I'm kind of late to the party but whatever.
What does it mean to look at a photograph of another's suffering? Does the voyeuristic aspect outweigh any benefit? While I disagreed with Sontag at times, in the end she holds up a dichotomy I found interesting and nuanced: the photographs as necessary vs the photographs as entirely imperfect. She finishes the book with a point I agree with: that photographs and even witnessing without the medium of photography in the way will never take the place of actual experience. I'm still thinking about her other point, that the pictures are actually necessary, because I feel like her evidence for that was less solid. She writes that it is human nature to turn away from these kinds of photos, and that that's not bad necessarily—but then what is the point of the photos? It gives an imperfect view of suffering; is it a necessary view, anyway? She says that photos should provide a starting point for action, but do photographs actually spur action to the point that the voyeurism is validated? She also brings up the fact that this idea that reality has been subsumed by media and photography is an elite opinion focused only on the first world. I wonder what she would say now if she were alive in 2023 about this. I also really would love an updated Susan Sontag essay on cameraphones. Obviously this will never happen :( I need to reread already, and I just finished this book.
I want to find everything else she's ever written and read it. I'm kind of late to the party but whatever.
challenging
informative
sad
"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. All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings."
"Among such archives of horror, the photographs of genocide have undergone the greatest institutional development. The point of creating public repositories for these and other relics is to ensure that the crimes they depict will continue to figure in people's consciousness. This is called remembering, but in fact it is a good deal more than that."
"Photographs of the suffering and martyrdom of a people are more than reminders of death, of failure, of victimization. They invoke the miracle of survival. To aim at the perpetuation of memories means, inevitably, that one has undertaken the task of continually renewing, of creating, memories—aided, above all, by the impress of iconic photograph,"
"Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us."
"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. "
"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,"
" Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget. "
"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."
"Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action."
"Among such archives of horror, the photographs of genocide have undergone the greatest institutional development. The point of creating public repositories for these and other relics is to ensure that the crimes they depict will continue to figure in people's consciousness. This is called remembering, but in fact it is a good deal more than that."
"Photographs of the suffering and martyrdom of a people are more than reminders of death, of failure, of victimization. They invoke the miracle of survival. To aim at the perpetuation of memories means, inevitably, that one has undertaken the task of continually renewing, of creating, memories—aided, above all, by the impress of iconic photograph,"
"Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us."
"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. "
"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,"
" Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget. "
"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."
"Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action."
Susan Sontag is one of those essayists whose words I long for in times like these, but the more I read of her, the more I realize that she has already responded to the issues that come up today. In Regarding the Pain of Others, originally published in 2003, Sontag has already foreseen the moral issues that I think about whenever I see people protesting masks while patients are shown suffering from COVID in hospitals on the news. She even addresses the problem of attention, namely the finite amount of it and its commercialized value. A valuable read.
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced