iraq

Susan Sontag: "Regarding the Torture of Others" & Commentary

Susan Sontag: "Regarding the Torture of Others"
"Endless war: endless stream of photographs. [...] But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq -- to identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. [...] In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable."
[New York Times Magazine: May 23, 2004]
[Also in The Guardian]
[Also in Truthout]

Andrew Sullivan: "Picture Frame"—Commentary on Sontag's "Regarding the Torture of Others"
[The New Republic]

Paul Schmelzer: "From Abu Ghraib to Dover AFB: Understanding the Images of War: May 6, 2004

"[...] while we recoil at such images--agreeing, as we must, that war is hell--what good does it do? Without a name for the dead or details of why they’re fighting, our ire has no focus. But when the dead are identified—a Palestinian child, an American GI, a North Vietnamese woman—the images lose their neutrality. Now we can place blame. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes that photographs of war’s victims are "a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus." In 2004, as always, that rhetoric takes on a decidedly political tone. [...]
"The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs," writes Sontag. "Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand." [...] "Narratives can make us understand," says Sontag. "Photographs do something else: they haunt us.""
[Eyeteeth]