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mads_jpg's review
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
After seeing so many haunting images from Gaza of Palestinians either dead or dying, many of them children, I wanted to understand it all better. Whether violent imagery creates lasting pathos, whether we should look or if it's just self flagellation, and whether images like these can actually make significant change.
These are admittedly very complicated questions to answer, so Sontag's ideas have left me feeling both less and more confused. Maybe it's harder to compare the almost real-time images from Motaz's Instagram stories to the war images filtered through television companies and journalists. Maybe it's a whole different beast seeing images of death through the eyes of someone you have a parasocial relationship with.
But I did leave this book feeling like I understood the desire to document and witness these atrocities, despite all the complications that come along with it. And all the emotions that can come up for people for different reasons, how sympathy can turn to apathy when someone feels hopeless to stop the suffering.
These are admittedly very complicated questions to answer, so Sontag's ideas have left me feeling both less and more confused. Maybe it's harder to compare the almost real-time images from Motaz's Instagram stories to the war images filtered through television companies and journalists. Maybe it's a whole different beast seeing images of death through the eyes of someone you have a parasocial relationship with.
But I did leave this book feeling like I understood the desire to document and witness these atrocities, despite all the complications that come along with it. And all the emotions that can come up for people for different reasons, how sympathy can turn to apathy when someone feels hopeless to stop the suffering.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide, Misogyny, Antisemitism, Injury/Injury detail, Genocide, Slavery, Violence, Body horror, Colonisation, Gore, Grief, Blood, Torture, Death, Racism, Sexism, Rape, Sexual violence, and War
pseudolain's review
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: War, Violence, Torture, Slavery, Murder, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, Racism, Genocide, Antisemitism, Rape, Physical abuse, and Gore
Moderate: Body horror, Classism, Fire/Fire injury, and Child death
americattt's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
"The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. 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."
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Gore, and War
sarahrose_a's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Violence, War, Body horror, Child death, Death, Rape, and Genocide
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