A review by americattt
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

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."
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