Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag compares and contrasts photography against other forms of art in her book Regarding the Pain of Others. In doing so, there are several recurring ideas that Sontag introduces. Particularly, Sontag uses a host of photographs depicting tragedy and war and compares them against similar images that are not photographs, to find some stark differences.

When it comes to a painting versus a photograph of something like a gory battlefield landscape, Sontag believes it is evident that the painting and photograph will evoke different responses. In Chapter 5, Sontag claims that photographs of devastation are transformative elements of culture primarily because they are taken through a single perspective. In other words, each photograph of the same thing from different angles and by different people would have separate meanings because a photograph is a measure of an experience and does not generate an opinion unless it is put into a context by the photographer. When seen, the photograph can elicit a certain beauty in the eye of each beholder. However, each photograph has a limited boundary to its interpretation because it has a sense of declared reality to it. This is not the case with a painting of the same thing because a painting is meant to and can evoke a different response within each viewer. If a photograph attempts to do the same, it receives criticism because it carries with it an element of brutal and declared reality. Therefore, wartime photographs are aesthetically challenged although they could be considered beautiful in bits and pieces.

Yet because of the concreteness of the devastation shown, a wartime photograph elicits a response of compassion and is more likely able to force the common viewer into taking some action. A wartime photograph is special compared to other works of art because it not only serves as a record of what actually has happened, regardless of how it is spun based on the photographer's perspective, but it also forces some sort of action because of its unquestioned reality. Based on the way it is presented, a wartime photograph can elicit different social responses. For instance, if a photograph depicts the death of someone similar to the viewer, then the viewer will fight against such an event from ever happening again. Conversely, if the death shown is considered favorable to the particular viewer, then that viewer will fight to make such events occur in the future. A painting of the same is incapable of causing social response unless it is backed up by photograph, at least in our times.

This ties in perfectly with Sontag's concept in Chapter 8. She claims photographs are memories of our past, but they tell each person different things that all fall under the same contextual umbrella. A wartime photograph shows an image of someone's hell, but the photograph doesn't tell each viewer to do the same thing about it. She claims this may be due to memory and not thinking. In other words, the photograph viewer immediately relates the picture to something in his memory, if capable of doing so, and acts based on that rather than isolating the picture for what it is by itself. Such devastating photographs show us the bounds to which humans are willing to go to get their way. They give us a greater awareness of what to expect at any time from any other person; wartime photographs thus increase our own social vigilance. Therefore, a photograph still can make a social statement although it is clearly defined by only the parameters the photographer wants us to know.