Regarding the Pain of Others

Even before Western culture had a written language, it had representations of brutality. In fact, Homer’s war stories and Da Vinci’s battle paintings challenged their audiences to partake in a strange kind of beauty, but one that seems “heartless” through the lens of the camera, Sontag notes (75-76). Consensus holds that art transforms, while photography bears witness. Yet Sontag contends, “The dual powers of photography—to generate documents and to create works of art—have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought and ought not to do” (76).

Paradoxically, we assume that artfulness distracts from suffering; likewise, captions must report, not interpret. Aesthetics drain our compassion. Yet the photograph “gives mixed signals” to the viewer: “Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!” (77). The epic scope of a Salgado photograph looks all-pervading, overwhelming, and finally beyond the realm of empathy. Yet Sontag argues that throughout Western history, the spectacular has drawn compassion through art.

As for building a sense of our recent past, Sontag declares that “there is no such thing as collective memory—part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction” (85). While photographs “objectify” by turning an event or a person into something that can be possessed, memory is individual and dies with each person” (86). Yet we do stipulate which representative images we will “own” (the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb test or Martin Luther King speaking at the Lincoln Memorial) to build the stories we remember; they form a shared ideology.

However, we do not remember through photographs so much as we remember the photographs themselves, which “eclipse” other forms of understanding (89). Here is another crucial difference between pictures and stories: “Narratives can make us understand: photographs do something else: they haunt us” (89). For example, Ron Haberle’s documentation of the My Lai massacre of 1968 haunted viewers because “there was something to be done, right now” (91), the idea being that the war could have been stopped.

Sontag returns to the issue of the obligation to look at photographs of assault and misery, demanding that the spectator not only peruse them but ask why it’s important to regard such brutality, and what can be learned from such works. After all, she explains, “[n]ot all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience” (95). Car accidents turn our heads even as they repulse us. The quandary first appears in Plato (here a precursor to Freud) as he contemplates reason, anger, and desire (98).

A gruesome image of brutality in a 1910 photograph of a prisoner in China obsessed modernist philosopher George Bataille in 1961, whose contemplation of it brought on “both a mortification of the feelings and a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge” (98). Attraction to such images can serve a variety of needs: to stave off weakness, to numb feelings, to admit the existence of what cannot be changed. Bataille, within a religious paradigm, links suffering to sacrifice, which then leads to exaltation, but not as suffering that demands to be reversed or undone or at least rejected.

Despite the voyeuristic attraction, it may be normal for people to dodge dwelling on the misery of others: “Wherever people feel safe […] they will be indifferent” (100). An onslaught of media images can lead to detachment; helplessness and fear also play a role in becoming shut down to scenes of violence. People resist horror when they feel helpless to prevent it: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers” (101).