Regarding the Pain of Others

After over 150 years of photojournalists (Sontag calls them “specialized tourists”) reporting from abroad, we are now able to become armchair spectators of far-away atrocities, and “if it bleeds, it leads” has become the practiced slogan of tabloids and non-stop TV news channels alike (18). Yet, Sontag reiterates that the viewing experience solicits contradictory reactions: compassion or praise, indignation or titillation (18).

War images suffer not only endless proliferation but also individual interpretation accompanied by collective constructions of attitudes. The frame of reference and level of vocabulary can target a select audience with words, but photographs operate within a universal visual language. Upgraded camera technology allows journalists to be on-the-spot and in-the-moment, so from the Civil War to the Vietnam War, Americans left behind epic photographs of the aftermath of slaughter for the “tele-intimacy” of routine massacres viewed from the living-room “perch” to take in the daily “diffusion and re-diffusion” of snippets of conflict without context (20, 21).

Distant events become real by being photographed, Sontag claims, but these days, there is often a freaky resemblance between a disaster and its representation, thanks to Hollywood movies that make their spectacles seem larger-than-life, but life, nonetheless—real, whereas Sontag references the attack on the World Trade Center with the expressions of its survivors: “It was like a dream” (22). Photographs hold the contradictory assets of objectivity and subjectivity. Yet viewers become suspicious when a photograph of an atrocity appears artistic (call it pretentious or untruthful, as they will). Instead, the work of an amateur strikes them as more authentic.

In our era of information overload, any one photograph serves as a shortcut to a fixed meaning housed in the mind. Sontag worries that an iconic “shot” such as the one of Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War soldier in the moment that he is struck down brings more shock than meaning, more value as a consumer product than as testament. However, Sontag salutes photographs taken in 1945, when Nazi concentration camps were liberated, and those of the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as they were being incinerated, as taken “one year when the power of photographs to define, not merely record, the most abominable realities trumped all the most complex narratives” (24).

In Chapter 3, Sontag drops Virginia Woolf’s presiding question and poses one of her own: “What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?” (40). She observes that iconic images of suffering, especially of wrath, have “a long pedigree,” even if we go back only as far as paintings and sculptures of Christ and his martyrs: “the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked” (40).

This particular habit of voyeurism, of the iconography of civilians at the mercy of a rapacious army, enters the secular domain for artists with realignments of power in the 17th century. However, Sontag chooses to salute Goya for his Disasters of War, eighty-three etchings published in 1863 (significantly, thirty-five years after his death) that depict Napoleon’s attack on Spain with neither spectacle nor narrative, but with captions on each print, provoking the viewer to take a serious look. In Sontag’s eyes, Goya ushers in a new era of morality and sorrow for artists and points to their legacy for the photographers who were to follow.

Sontag claims that even if artists “make” drawings while photographers “take” pictures, a photograph may be a trace but never a transparency: “It is always an image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (46). However, photographs are presumed not to synthesize a likeness, to evoke, but to show precisely; therefore, they serve as evidence. In this regard, the first war photography fulfills a mission of “disgrace” in serving the needs of the British crown during the Crimean War. To counter the written critique of abuses of British soldiers by their own command, Fenton was sent to the front but barred from taking pictures of the maimed, the ill, or the dead, “rendering the war as a dignified all-male group outing” (50). By virtue of both framing the image and staging tableaux, Fenton kept the war itself off-camera.

In the American Civil War, Lincoln gave access to Mathew Brady and his team, but the interest in war photography became entrepreneurial. Brady, like Woolf, spoke of a duty to record and supposedly claimed, “The camera is the eye of history,” aligning the camera’s capacity with that of novelists seeking the rising “realism” (53). Yet to “record” with photographs for Brady’s team was to compose, just as Fenton scattered cannonballs on the ground before “take two” of his photographs from the same tripod position. By now, Sontag has shown us that we should not be surprised that iconic photographs have been staged. She concludes, “No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer” (55).