“Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003)
Susan Sontag

Sontag’s book, it turns out, resists summary. Instead, below are 10 of the most striking ideas.

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1. Reading photographs. In her book Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf argues that photographs depicting the violence of war elicit a similar disgust in all viewers. Her point is that genuine images of suffering and destruction are surefire tools for creating an abhorrence of war. Sontag, on the other hand, is not so sure.

 

Sontag explores, for example, what counts as a genuine image of a war and shows us how authentic images are also always subject to a series of conventions (see below on authenticity). But even when we are satisfied that a photograph is authentic, like any other text, it can be read differently by different viewers. The destruction of war is not an argument against war. After all, war is supposed to be destructive. An image of the violence of war may well elicit a call for peace, but equally, the image might produce a call for revenge, for more war. Sontag reminds us also that some of the earliest war photography, depicting the Crimean War, was intended to show war in a positive light.

 

And more than this, Sontag’s major concern, which echoes throughout the book, is that a viewer may just throw up their hands, concluding that terrible things happen and there is nothing to be done. What if war photos add to this impression? One of the effects of constant exposure to images of the horrors of war might be to create a sense of the inevitability of war. To be blunt, horrific photos of war might just persuade the viewer that the world is simply horrific.

 

2. Being a spectator. Images of suffering can be alluring, but the kind of thinking which links pain to sacrifice and exultation is fundamentally religious and therefore alien to secular thinking, Sontag claims. In other words, a contemporary, secular viewer is unlikely to derive a sense of elation on seeing the suffering of others.

 

Seeing images of suffering, from a distance, may well generate a sense of shame – we can do nothing to alleviate the suffering depicted, but this does not make the practice of viewing real suffering inherently unethical. Indeed, as Sontag notes, there is no other way to see suffering.

 

If, as she hopes, the experience of seeing suffering leads to thinking and a new understanding, then it is essential. Ultimately, Sontag argues that there is no ethical problem with presenting or viewing images from war.

 

3. Shock. Shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value. Well before the invention of photography, there has been no shortage in the depiction of suffering. As Sontag wryly notes, “the appetite for showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.” In both cases she links these images with pleasure where viewing bodies in pain offers the pleasure of being able to look without flinching, or simply the pleasure of flinching. 

 

Although horrific images can shock us into changing our conduct, Sontag notes that shock can easily wear off over time and with over-exposure. Compassion is unstable; it needs to be nurtured or else it will wither.

 

But more than this, Sontag is skeptical of the practical benefits of shock. At best, it can lead to compassion, but this is an emotion that “proclaims our innocence.” If we feel sorry for those depicted, then their suffering cannot be our fault. So rather than feeling compassion, we would be better off thinking about how we might be implicated in the suffering at hand. 

 

Sontag deems the value of shock to be limited by its shallowness. While a shocking image might stay with the viewer, or even haunt them, “the photograph tells us very little—except that war is hell, and that graceful young men with guns are capable of kicking overweight older women lying helpless, or already killed, in the head.”

 

Ultimately, Sontag implies that there is a certain naive immaturity to being shocked by photographs. We should not be surprised by human wickedness. Indeed, it is our duty to be aware of it. In a sense, if we find a photograph shocking, it is because we have not properly grown up, but are still living in a childish fantasy world where humans are incapable of horrific acts. Sontag describes this state of being as “moral defectiveness.”

 

Since photos are limited in what they can teach us, Sontag looks to narrative as a superior medium for aiding proper understanding.

 

4. Words. Photographs are often understood in conjunction with words. Captions accompanying images will often direct our interpretation of what we are seeing. On a simple level, the caption might tell us who is doing what to whom. And of course, captions are not always true. 

 

On a deeper level, a caption can also influence what we think we see in a photograph. We are liable to project emotions on the faces of pictured individuals when a caption adds context to a photograph. Sontag gives the example of a photograph from the Spanish Civil War where a caption causes viewers to read this image as a portent of aerial bombardments to come.

 

5. Taboo. Sontag notes that a powerful taboo remains which restricts showing the faces of the dead. Although the need to reveal the truth forms a justification for breaking this taboo, discretion is still expected.

 

Sontag traces the adherence to or transgression of this taboo to political concerns noting that good taste is required in order to uphold public order. Conversely, the taboo is less likely to be adhered to when depicting the faces of non-westerners. In this case, the function of the images is to  project a sense that tragedy is inevitable in the developing world. This is an idea which we are apparently comfortable with.

 

6. Beauty. Photographs depicting war and destruction should not be beautiful. Not only are there ethical implications in finding beauty in the pain and suffering of others, but aesthetically pleasing photographs tend to cross the line into art. This leads to a contradiction in that beautiful images of suffering both call for the end of the suffering while declaring the suffering to be something worth looking at and potentially enjoying. 

 

Sontag bluntly notes that many images taken in the aftermath of 9/11 were in fact beautiful. In this sense, she concedes that images of war and destruction are always susceptible to being attractive objects of enjoyment.

 

7. Memory. Most wars go unnoticed and unremembered. Indeed, as Sontag notes, “it takes some very peculiar circumstances for a war to become genuinely unpopular.” But when a war does become internationally recognized, photographs play a key role in how the war is remembered.

 

Iconic war photographs become collective memories. A generation of Americans, for example, remembers the Vietnam war in part through the image of a nine year old girl in the aftermath of a napalm attack. But Sontag reminds us that real memory, by its nature, is individual. Real memories are different for each of us. There can be no such thing as a collective memory which is not, in the long run, fiction. If we all remember an event through the same image, it is not because this is what we recall, but rather what we have been made to recall.

 

More than this, photos do not just dictate what we recall of an event, but Sontag claims that memory only operates through photos. Other ways of recalling are obscured by the power of photographs. This has a limiting effect on how we understand events.

 

With this in mind, photographs have a central place in the way that we are made to remember certain events. When museums establish permanent photographic exhibitions of historical events, this is in order to create a fixed and mandatory remembering. Although Sontag does not really object to this in terms of the holocaust, she does point out that there are many events which are not commemorated in this manner, not least the history of slavery in the US. 

 

Sontag also worries about the negative aspects of remembering. It is possible that remembering events is over-valued in comparison to thinking about them. Too much remembering, she claims, leads to bitterness and is therefore a barrier to peacemaking. Making peace is about forgetting. So rather than inscribing specific memories of war, photographs should cause us to recall in general what humans are capable of:

 

If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another.

 

8. Reality. Sontag has no time for theorists like Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard who argue that we live in the “society of the spectacle” where seeing something in the media is what makes it real. For Sontag, war is real. Reality is real. Sontag describes this fashionable view as “ breathtaking provincialism.” It may be that war has been converted into entertainment in parts of the west, but it is not the case that everyone is a spectator. People involved in wars are not spectators. People suffering in wars are not spectators. Sontag is appalled by the cynicism and apathy that she sees in these theories.

 

9. Authenticity. Above all, we want war photographs to be real. So real, in fact, that the standards of authenticity are unattainable. There is a belief that photographs have inbuilt objectivity – the camera is a machine and cannot lie, but Sontag reminds us that there is always a human behind the viewfinder. There is always a point of view. Photographs are always framed; things are included and others excluded. Sontag writes that “we want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love, and those being photographed to be unaware of the camera, ‘off guard.’” But again, this is not the case. Some scenes only occur so that they can be photographed.

 

We are always surprised and disappointed to learn that war photographs have been staged. Yet many of the most famous images of war depict bodies which have been rearranged or events reenacted. In this sense, they fall short of what we expect from a war photograph, which is that it is unaltered and really shows what it claims to show. When we realize that a photograph has been manipulated, it loses its moral authority.

 

The drive for authenticity requires that war photographs are somewhat imperfect. If a photograph looks too good or is too well composed, it arouses our suspicions. In this sense, artistry appears to taint the objectivity of the war photograph. War images should not be too well lit or well composed. They must not look like a freeze-frame from a film. Instead, the aesthetic of the war photograph must attest to the chance capturing of a real and unplanned event.

 

And this is the key to the dominance of photography in representing war. Only photography can provide authenticity since it is the only form of art where the artist does not need years of professional training. Whereas paintings are made, photos are taken. Photos seem real since they are not the result of the years-long honing of skill, but the clicking of a button and the recording of reality.

 

10. Understanding. Sontag’s book closes with an extended analysis of “Dead Troops Talk”, a huge, backlit photograph by Jeff Wall. She describes the photo as an “exemplary” antiwar image. Significantly, the photograph is explicitly inauthentic. The entire image was staged in a studio and depicts, as the title suggests, dead soldiers in discussion with one another. Sontag focuses on the lack of interest that the dead soldiers have for the living – either the living characters in the photograph, or in the living viewers in the gallery. This lack of interest, she argues, reflects the fact that those not present in a war, can never have any proper understanding of the experience of war. If dead troops could talk, it seems to say, it would be of no use, since we would not understand them. The book ends with these words:

 

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.

 

In other words, photographing war will always be inadequate to the task of representing the experience of war. The best that a photo can do (assuming Wall’s photo to be the best example of antiwar photography) is to underline this inadequacy. At least viewers of this photograph are aware that they have no understanding of what the dead soldiers have been through. At least they are not misled into believing that they have the slightest understanding of what the pain of others is like.