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joe_olipo 's review for:
Regarding the Pain of Others
by Susan Sontag
Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react. But what is really being asked for here? That we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an “ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Regarding [Photographs of] the Pain of Others
Some people are living (w)hole lives in abeyance. We are thinking of Sontag herself — as one never imagines her — crouching in the shadow of the monolithic On Photography [1973] (joining us in our habitual position). To stand upright 'under the sign of Saturn' requires a certain levity-for-serious-situations e.g. what Sontag might call 'Camp,' "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You're expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love" (Sontag, Notes on 'Camp'). We are still awaiting the publication of the last edition of Susan Sontag's journals which may tell what Sontag thought about this piece, albeit she would have to be particularly earnest about what 'fun' she's having. What's 'Camp' about Susan Sontag in general — her so-called "humorless" invulnerability (Sontag is probably funny, just not on the page) — reaches an apotheosis in Regarding the Pain of Others. (Which, of course, isn't about "the pain of others" at all — instead being about particular genre of Photography (A young Sontag (brilliant, obnoxious) picks up on the humor in this — the text behaves as if it were trying to abridge an antiquated assignment from junior high.)) Invulnerability which guards itself in seriousness (as in the fragile male ego-defense) is precisely camp for the reason Sontag notes: In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails." Maybe we are not yet capable of 'Camping' Sontag's grave-side writing (one thought for a potential essay never written: the cemetery as model of the ideal suburb, per Sontag's journals). Under such circumstances it would be helpful to recognize that Sontag might be read best in the "future perfect tense" (optimistically): for a more brilliant generation (or one much more stupid) Sontag 'will have been' Camp.
"This is why in my film Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi [1999] I ask the cameraman to shake the camera, because if the camera is shaking it must be true!" (Avi Mograbi, Killer Images [2012]) What's remarkable about Regarding the Pain of Others is a peculiar admixture of understatement and overstatement. The text begins with a discourse on the photographs that Virginia Woolf reads against the cause of war ("Look at the pain war brings others!"), noting that these same images may also be read in support of it ("Look at the pain the enemy has inflicted on others!"). This echoes the contemporary wisdom that "images [of Bosnia] which might have signified aggression or calculated political slaughter seemed to signify only tragedy or disaster or human suffering and hence were available for inscription or montage" (Thomas Keenan, Killer Images). Here, Sontag's analysis perhaps understates the treachery of images (this is not On Photography). It seems that images are always taking their revenge for the critique in that earlier text in which the camera is reinscribed as distancing-machine (of the tourist) creating a protective (empty) space between photographer and an "experience" of the photographed object. This text reminds us that the photograph itself is a kind of distancing-machine with respect to the image it captures. Photographs have always said something other than what they say they say they say. (It seems therefore a moot point that some of the most iconic war-photographs are in fact doctored-images (see, as Sontag notes, Roger Fenton's civil war photography, also possibly Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima [1945]).)
If it were possible, Sontag's remarks on the siege of Sarajevo are perhaps more understated. We are thinking such statements are proper to the conscientious United States intellectual, isolated in her milieu, commenting from afar, somewhat less pertinent than remarks from photojournalists on the ground (see: Killer Images [2012]), and we are reminded of Sontag's (impressive, albeit perhaps misguided) Trip to Hanoi [1969] when American intellectuals once put boots-on-ground for the cause. We are ready to be clever playing the analyst, suspecting Sontag's vociferous (yet understated) condemnations of Sarajevian violence of belying the foreclosed notion that the author can't admit, even to herself, that she doesn't care as much as she used to. And this might be appropriate except for the fact (and this was a surprise to me) that Susan Sontag was one of few Americans to visit Sarajevo during the siege. (She directed a production of Waiting for Godot and gave several interviews.) It's very serious and very camp that Sontag was earnest enough to travel here. (And with the additional burden of knowing that one is not able to do anything at all (to help).) Her forthright remarks on those Greatest Generation anti-war novelists (read: chauvinists) in these interviews are particularly 'Camp' (read: So True!):
S.S.: "You mention Kurt Vonnegut… Joseph Heller, the man who wrote Catch –22, he really understands the nature of war. I do know Kurt Vonnegut; I have never met Joseph Heller, but all of these people are just sitting in their huge, rich apartments and going out to the country on the weekends and living their private lives. I mean, that is the truth. I’m sorry to disillusion you, but they don’t involve themselves in any political action in the United States; much less do they think to go abroad and do something serious. These people have nothing to do with anything serious. It’s very, very disillusioning, and I’m sorry to say it. But they don’t care; they don’t have a conscience; they don’t think of the writer as a witness of conscience. They don’t even have this idea. I don’t know anyone—do you know of anyone–who has this idea? It’s very strange that the two people at the end of the year, the first anniversary of the war, who’ve come to visit you from the United States, are two middle-aged women who were in Hanoi twenty-five years ago: myself and Joan Baez."
O.H.: "Would this have been true of Vonnegut twenty, twenty-five years ago?"
S.S.: "Yes. Absolutely, it would have been true of Vonnegut twenty-five years ago. I’m afraid you have a terrible illusion about these people. They are very selfish."
— Susan Sontag, Interview with Omer Hadžiselimović (1993)
One imagines Susan Sontag in these moments feeling caught out against the wall — the photograph is unable to help — and images were never as helpful as one had once thought. (Certainly those moralizing American "anti-war" writers-slash-intellectuals were never of any particular service.) It may seem as if one is out of options, yet the closure Sontag posits in this text is an overstatement. We recall her remarks on the "Ecology of Images," which are frankly overstated, "But what is really being asked for here? That we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an “ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images" (69). It seems Sontag had originally meant "Ecology" in the antiquated sense i.e. conservation of a "natural" environs via man-made stewardship. Here it would be helpful to read our understanding of ecology as a modern science over this original intention. Understood as a "science of relationships among images and their environment," we appreciate that there is "always already" an "ecology of images" even if it's one you don't like (or can't understand). Such an ecology would be better able to integrate the images of Sontag's specimens (the doctored war photographs), given the consequence of an 'ecology of images' is that there are no "unnatural images," just as in a biological ecology there are no "unnatural" organisms. A more significant consequence of this understanding is that it allows an opening of the closure of the photograph, in which, by a process of (mis?)reading, it's possible, again, to begin to probe the obscure connection between what an image is and what it does.
Although this text concludes prior to the dissemination of images from the American torture operation at Abu Ghraib, we do not have to speculate as to whether Sontag continued to be preoccupied with concerns of the photographic image growing beyond its container like a bad child. An op-ed in the New York Times (titled "Regarding the Torture of Others" — I blame the Sontag's editor here) suggests an essayist who can read an image in context, but doesn't move beyond the (overstated) closure of the what the image says it says: "No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib" (Susan Sontag, Regarding the Torture of Others [2004]).
Sontag's op-ed, which isn't so much about the image-slash-photograph as the pro-torture policies of the Bush administration, seems to derive it's (standard) reading of these images from the sense of "ecology" to which Sontag is always returning (though it should be said such images, cropped above, are frankly terrifying even in the post-post-Bush era). Starting from an ecology of images-not-to-be-trusted it's possible to get a more interesting reading out of this. Joshua Oppenheimer in conversation with Errol Morris:
JO: "And then the smile – you wrote about it once, you were so fascinated by it that you analyzed whether the smile was in fact a genuine smile. But the other question, the other fascinating thing, is if Graner and the others were with her on this, that’s one thing, but her smile may have been directed more towards her colleagues at the time, and the photographs may not have been intended as memorabilia at all, but rather as a kind of, as she says, as a way of exposing what they were being asked to do."
EM: "Or both! The two are not mutually exclusive [. . .] And yet no one seems to ever say this. And yet I see it again and again and again. But what is interesting is that the taking of the photographs, and I will say this, I believe this is true in many instances, by Chuck Graner, and by Sabrina Harman, was disobedience to authority, not obedience to authority. The photography was an act of freedom and disobedience."
JO: "In a way her smile must have been genuine at moments. As you know."
EM: "[She was infiltrating these moments]"
JO: "Disobedience under the cover of a smile and a thumbs up."
— Joshua Oppenheimer, Killer Images [2012]
What's interesting about this argument is that, even if we are entertaining it, we remain in a double bind. The smile that allows the documentation via photograph is also "the smile that becomes then the lynchpin of the government’s bad apple argument" (Oppenheimer). So there's a subversive ecology which produces these images, but the means of their production always already codes them as in-visible, such that even a Sontag can't see the "differance." And it's a small difference, albeit if it were to exist, this would perhaps blow open the closure of Sontag's seriousness along the lines of the 'Camp' potential of reading the same things differently. It would then be possible to re-read the image the same way one might read Turgenev's Execution of Troppmann referenced in this text, which, if you take heed from Sontag's seriousness (so serious it might be camp), you will never discover a certain fact (I had to check a rare edition of Turgenev's completed works in order to discover this . . .), whatever small difference it makes, that, on the day of his death, Troppmann was running down the stairs — and Turgenev, catching his breath, was scurrying after.