A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of
violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects.
*
Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag
followed up her monumental* On Photography with an extended study of
human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf
in Three Guineas*: How in your opinion are we to prevent war?*
For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made
vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the
insanity of war.
One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies
countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium
of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are
viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is
the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such
images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far
away?
First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On
Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of
being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not
only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is
waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the
obligations of conscience.
