"To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude". A splendid analysis of suffering and pain as depicted by photography within our 'society of spectacle', written with Sontag's usual lucidity, and just as eye-opening as On Photography, published thirty years prior.

'Are you waiting for a shell to go off so you can photograph some corpses?' To be read by all at least once. A powerful read, written brilliantly. It's Sontag after all. A friend once caught me reading Sontag, and all she said was that Sontag's a bit too intense for her. I think for me, Sontag's the perfect amount of intensity. She tackles heavy subjects respectfully and carefully, in such a precise, and beautiful way. In this particular book of hers, she explores photography and other creati

Sontag's second book on photography, and like the first back in 1977 this contains zero photographs. Words are Sontag's antidote to strong images, she is only really concerned with photography's prurient intrusiveness, there dislocation of reality, actual photographs are of less interest to her, and are mentioned, in stern verbal paraphrase, only to be reproved for their untrustworthiness. Sontag retells the familiar stories about photographs that sanitise or falsify the conflict they are suppos...

I’ve always thought that one of the things it would be fairly reasonable to have written on my headstone would be, “He often missed the obvious”. I was saying to people at work the other day that there was a part of this book where I thought, “god, how did I get to be 50 and never think of this before?” It was the bit where she talks about the holocaust and holocaust museums and then questions why America doesn’t have a museum to the victims of slavery – you know, those victims are still walking...

A bracingly intelligent look at the assumptions we make about images of suffering (paintings, war photography, TV reporting, etc.). This is one of those that I’m tempted to “review” by just quoting the whole damn book:“What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past…appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed.”“We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and death, and those being photographed to b...

An examination of images of war and how those that view these images react to them. Concise, Sontag writes of the history of war photography and earlier depictions of war through paintings, and the purpose of these images, for the victims of war, the perpetrators, as well as those that view them.“The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images”A fact that many can confirm. Although I did experience war myself at some point...

The book is disappointingly diffuse and lacking in incisiveness. This probably reflects Sontag's ambivalence about how she is supposed to react to images of death and destruction. But such ambivalence doesn't make for compelling reading, especially since the themes which she explores (e.g., the suspicious claim to objectivity of photography, voyeurism/complicity masquerading as disinterestedness in the viewer) will be familiar to anybody who has reflected on the subject. So perhaps its value lie...

Opening lines: ‘In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war.’

I've been thinking along these lines for some time now. Probably we all have. A lot of these ideas are not new. But it's nice to see them explored, thought over despite having been thought over already. Sontag does not give us easy answers, because the act of looking at other people's pain is uncomfortable, and probably should always be uncomfortable. No amount of essaying about it should take that uncomfortableness away. However, while words will often cause us to think, photos of war and viole...

تحكي سونتاغ عن الصورة والتي تعطي المعنى الموضوعي وبالحين نفسه تعبر الى العاطفة التي تطرح المعنى وتفسره وهذا ما لا يقدر عليه سواها الصورة هنا متعلقة بالحرب وممارستها للتجديدية في هذا المعنى فصورة المجازر في كل مرة هي كأول مرة متجددة ومتجزرة في معنى الصراع ، وضع الصورة ومعناها لتقريب البعيد عن الحرب اليها والمساهمة برفضها وبالحين نفسه توليد شفقة غير فاعلة تقود الى لا مبالاة في قمة السخرية ، وطبيعة المشاركة التي تقوم بها الصورة واخلاقيتها ، و هي اذ تذكر ذلك وغيره تقف موقف توضيح وتبيين لا غير ، ولا

this is such a fantastic, powerful essay that it truly is a pity how it suffers from (a) a very diffused telling, so much so that the chapter categorizations seem rushed through, and (b) the lack of visual?? for a book that deals with how 'war-making and picture-taking are congruent activities,' and brings into study so many historical photographic representations, it's not very understandable to me how leaving out the photographs themselves contributes to 'both objective record and personal tes...

The question turns on a view of the principal medium of the news, television. An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are by definition images of which, sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has its origin in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images.

A brilliant expansion and revision of On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others argues for approaching images of suffering only as invitations to consider the origins and impact of social inequality. Drawing attention to how photography is always both art and testimony, Sontag convincingly deconstructs the idea that a photo of pain by itself can reveal anything universal or self evident about oppression, historical or ongoing. The author then claims that, even if photos of suffering can’t act...

Sometimes back I watched the movie “The Bang-Bang Club” based upon the lives of a group of photojournalists who went by that name in Johannesburg in the mid 80s. These photojournalists mostly clicked photographs of the victims of apartheid or of the violence perpetrated by clashes between different black ethnic groups in South Africa. The movie also focused on the distress which these journalists went through after or while clicking the photographs. One of the journalists of the club, Kevin Cart...

Sontag's essay is concerned with the moral implications of looking, through photographs, at people who are suffering or dead. Much of the book is a history of war photography, which is intimately bound with the history of public tolerance of violent photos. While Sontag does not provide any revolutionary ideas, the essay is a succinct and thorough examination of the issues surrounding photography. And, if there is no grand thesis to keep in mind, her exploration is full of smaller, thought-provo...

An engaging essay on the photography of suffering: what can we photograph, what should we, do we have a duty, when does it become voyeurism or exploitative, when is it reference, do we become numb to seeing atrocities in a world where were bombarded with information and can you make people care. Worth the read

I was going to give this borderline self-indulgent rant two stars until Sontag hissed at the Frenchies for how unbelievably provincialist society of spectacle is; how classist; how much a sign of dubious privilege; and how the third world doesn't have the luxury to patronise reality. I was going to give it two stars until Sontag cleared the fog around how if we could do something about what the atrocity images show, we might not care as much about the moralising issues that atrocity photography

A common criticism of Sontag’s writings (as noted in other reviews) is that they’re not discerning enough and frequently pose “What?” or “How?” instead of being decisive and affirming. I actually believe this is a strength utilized in her essays. Many of the ideas aren’t fully developed or entirely convincing, but that can be useful for reflection and stimulate discussion. I always find myself thinking about her points more than I do with other writers. Sontag mainly speaks about photography and...

Reducing The Pain of The OtherSusan Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.Sontag attacks the modern obsession with photography, with documenting everything. She looks at all the arguments on why photography might he...

Sontag opens here with a critique of Virginia Woolf's comments on photographs from war in Three Guineas. While Woolf begins by making a feminist distinction between her perspective from that of a real or imagined male lawyer, she enters a 'we' with him in the face of the photographs; photographs of the victims of war, Sontag writes 'create the illusion of consensus'. Sontag's aim here is to (re)problematise the 'we' Woolf accepts, as well as to restore what is lost in the limited reading she mak...