logo

32 pages 1 hour read

Susan Sontag

Regarding the Pain of Others

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2003

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Symbols & Motifs

Firsts in War Photography

A subtle but hands-on way in which Sontag organizes her extended essay about how we look at the pain of others is to provide a series of “first time” references throughout her work. While they do not necessarily follow a historical timeline, they do follow the themes of her argument as she develops it. However, these references do something more: they show us just how recent war photography is in the evolution of art and technology, and how it came to differ from other expressions of appalling, massive attacks on our lives.

The first major wars for which there exist accounts by photographers are the Crimean War and the American Civil War, even though it wasn’t until after World War I that cameras could capture combat (20). The then-new. lightweight Leica camera, using 35mm film and catching 36 shots before it needed to be reloaded, made the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) the first to be “covered” by professionals working at the front line (21).

By 1945, when photographers could use portable cameras with range finders and multiple lenses that gave them clarity from a distance, it was the first time they could surpass the power of narrative to “define, not merely record,” events at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau, as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki (24-25).

The Vietnam War was the first to establish “tele-intimacy” between victims and remote viewers throughout the daily onslaught of TV images. Larry Burrows, “the first important photographer to do a whole war in color,” brought “verisimilitude, that is, shock” to the pages of Life for ten years until he was shot down in 1971 and the magazine closed down in 1972 (37-38).

Massive, unwarranted suffering had long been a theme in religious art, but Sontag marks the first war-protest-art as a “quintessentially secular subject,” with eighteen etchings by Jacques Callot in 1633, each published with captions in verse casting moral judgement on the invasion and occupation of Lorraine, France (43). However, it is Goya’s art to which Sontag repeatedly refers as a “turning point in the history or moral feelings and of sorrow—as deep, as original, and as demanding.” With Goya, she asserts, “a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art” (44-45).

That standard did not hold, Sontag argues, in the Crimea for the man known as the first war photographer, Roger Fenton, who was really an emissary of the British regime. Fenton served the needs of neither Prince Albert’s soldiers nor their victims. Under strict prohibitions, he posed his subjects for staged photography (48-50). The first newsreel of a battle, in the Spanish-American War of 1898, was entirely staged as “real,” with Teddy Roosevelt as its lead player and director of the action, for Vitagraph. “Only starting with the Vietnam War is it virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were set-ups,” Sontag tells us, commenting that this condition “is essential to the moral authority of these images” (57). While the first time that photography by the press at the front was banned was during World War I, it was not until the first televised war coverage five decades later that censorship became both more imperative and more difficult.

Photography in Comparison with Other Arts

Sontag uses another structuring motif, a means of repetition with variation in organizing her material, to show us the potential and the limits of photography in drawing compassion and even action from its viewers. She compares and contrasts photography with other arts, mostly visual but sometimes narrative, in order to test the unique features of the relatively recent yet now ubiquitous form of expression. With abundant illustrations and theories driven by purpose, she probes photography in relation to literature (whether spoken or written), painting, etching, and cinema.

It’s worth quoting here Sontag’s own introduction to a pre-eminent author on both sides of the Atlantic as he reacts to the Great War:

In 1915, none other than the august master of the intricate cocooning of reality in words, the magician of the verbose, Henry James, declared to the New York Times: ‘One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one’s thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated…’ (25).

Photography was co-opting the power of words. Sontag quotes American newspaper commentator Walter Lippmann in 1922: “Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real” (25). But soon enough, what was “real” was their power to shock. By 1949, the emerging weekly news magazine, Paris Match, adapted as its advertising motto, “The weight of words, the shock of photos.” Sontag claims that photography has always been driven by the quest for more “dramatic” images, par for the modern culture in which it arrived, in which shock solicits consumption and produces value.

Because the camera actually produces a physical trace of its subject, the photograph, says Sontag, is “superior to any painting as a memento of the vanished past and the dear departed” (24). But capturing the emotion of death in the making, as it occurs in war, is another challenge, and Sontag salutes Goya for representing war as unspectacular. He builds a cumulative impact without a narrative, the standard device of war literature from the Iliad to front-page news of Afghanistan. On the other hand, Sontag also notes how Leonardo da Vinci instructs his artists to make every detail of the battle painting as gruesome as possible. The image should inspire terror, not pity, and therefore, a compelling beauty. “That a gory battlescape could be beautiful—in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of war made by artists,” Sontag observes, but the concept doesn’t work with cameras, which are machines destined to document (75).

There is one art Sontag mentions that can possibly surpass the photograph in generating productive compassion, and it also uses a camera. That is the cinema, because it requires (unlike television) uninterrupted physical time. It both plays in time (usually narrative) and demands time for its participation, thereby offering a sustained meditation in a shared but imaginary space. Sontag cites a 1977 film: “No photograph or portfolio of photographs can unfold, go further, and further still, as do(es) The Ascent (1977) by Ukrainian director Larissa Shepitko, the most affecting film about the sadness of war I know…” (122).

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text