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Title: Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0-374-24858-3 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 19 February, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.57 (7 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Suan Sontag feels her own pain
Comment: And that's about it. She's a racist with a brilliant mind, and therefore most adept at propoganda. This book, as well as the rest of her work, to some extent and another profoundly reveals this.
Rating: 3
Summary: War in the time of photography
Comment: It is photography, beginning with the Civil War, that almost exclusively provides us a window to the suffering of others. Ms. Sontag's essay explores the capacity of the photographic arts to convey such suffering. Throughout, she identifies photographs that have seemed to distill the image of war in a particularly unforgettable way, that is, to imprint elements of suffering, both uniquely associated with a specific war at a specfic point in time and more generally attributable to war. Although she refers to her book's "argument," it seems more precise to maintain that, like the subject of her essay, her aim here is to assess the power and the limits of photography to convey pain to those viewers who enjoy the luxury of being detached from the specific suffering so depicted. Stated differently, her essay itself develops an "image" of the art of photography and its effect on spectators who enjoy various degrees of detachment from images before them.
Having been one of the more "provincial" spectators she describes in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others appears to provide an excellent source to discover particularly powerful photographs, at least as commended by Ms. Sontag who has been seriously contemplating the "war image" in all its manifestations for at least two decades. It would have been helpful for the book to have included some of the examples she describes. (This is Art History without the art.) There are times, too, when she seems to forget that suffering is not a stranger in the so-called developed, modern world. The haunting images, captured by photographers on 9/11, of men and women jumping to certain death from the upper floors of the World Trade Center to avoid consumption in the inferno that it had become, will forever retain the sad distinction of being among this century's first "representations" of the continuing horror of suffering in war.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting points, but what is her "argument"?
Comment: In my experience, a non-fiction book on history, sociology or politics generally does one of two things. It reports and/or it opines. However, it seemed to me that this little essay, though making a number of interesting observations about war and photography, did neither. Indeed, virtually the whole time, I kept waiting for her ultimate opinion on the issue to come out. By the end, I never saw it. And yet, in the very first sentence of her acknowledgments (and elsewhere therein), she refers to "the argument of this book." Even after reading the laudatory reviews of this book, I couldn't tell what others perceived the "argument" to be either. I am assuming that her "argument" has something to do with the effect that photography has on war. For example if I had to guess (and if it turns out that I am totally off base, it wouldn't shock me), it may be that too many photos of the suffering of others may numb the senses to it and thus should be discouraged. Or maybe, she is making the exact opposite "argument"--that we don't see enough such photos and thus people can't really appreciate how horrible war is. In addition, whatever her argument, is she suggesting that we as a people do something different than what we do now, or is she simply offering neutral observations on the way of the world as it exists now? I have no doubt that others smarter than I could answer all of these questions, but I would have appreciated a little synopsis of her self-described "argument" so I knew what it was.
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Title: On Photography by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0312420099 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 25 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Against Interpretation : And Other Essays by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0312280866 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 25 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes, Richard Howard ISBN: 0374521344 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1982 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0312420137 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 25 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald, Anthea Bell ISBN: 0375504842 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 11 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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