Regarding the pain of others Susan Sontag New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2003 131 pp $37 ISBN 0-374-24858-3
The dominant understanding of human nature in current theories of moral reasoning is notably idealistic. Contemporary discourse on ethics tends not to grapple with the lunar landscape of the Somme battlefield, the death camps at Dachau and Auschwitz, the mass killing spree in Rwanda. Reasonable moral agents, we are informed, would not commit such acts. True enough, but human history is scarcely characterized by gentle reason unfolding through time. Our late 20th- and early 21st-century theories of morality do a notably poor job of recognizing the extent to which particular experiences of human misery and agony are products of deliberate, calculated actions by other humans. And they are quite incapable of explaining the satisfied grins on the faces of Einsatzgruppen squad members photographed as they execute unarmed Jews or Russians, or the pleased looks of happy, church-going families gazing out of photos of charred, naked, lynched black Americans.
If philosophers and theologians have often ignored the extent to which human misery results from the deliberate, carefully planned choices and actions of other human beings, photojournalists have offered much grimmer testimonies of the human condition. Witnesses to the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and conflicts in Korea, Biafra, Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia — photographers of war, famine and genocide — provide a sordid visual chronology of the violence of the modern age. Photojournalists, much like members of Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Committee of the Red Cross, have played an important international role in bearing witness to human suffering and insisting that members of relatively privileged societies recognize and confront what is happening in settings of violence and planned mayhem. Susan Sontag's latest work, Regarding the Pain of Others, is a thoughtful meditation on the limitations and capacities of photojournalism in helping humans comprehend the causes and consequences of war, famine and other forms of destruction.
Sontag explores how photography connects humans to events unfolding in far-flung places. It was through the visual medium of photography, Sontag argues, that distant noncombatants were first exposed to the consequences of war. Photographs offered depictions of ruin, death, destruction, loss, terror and suffering that could never be conveyed by text, dioramas or etchings. Photographs, Sontag suggests, brought together both objectivity (a snapshot or “trace” of events) and subjectivity (the individual agency of the particular photographer framing the “shot”). By the time of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, photojournalism had become a special form of witnessing. New photo magazines such as Vu in France, Life in the United States and Picture Post in the United Kingdom were established in the 1930s. In 1947, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and other leading photographers established the Magnum Photo Agency in Paris.
The moral dimension of photojournalism is readily recognizable in photographs of the liberation of the death camps in Poland and Germany, the shelling and sniper warfare in Bosnia and the machete victims in Rwanda. In different times and places, such photographs have served different purposes: to bear witness to human suffering; to provide an evidentiary record of crimes against humanity; to urge intervention on the side of particular victims; to generate public support for the negotiated cessation of hostilities. Though moralistic, photojournalism is also multivalent. Photographs, though they have been characterized as “a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye,” as Virginia Woolf called them, can be accorded different meanings and put to different uses.
While Sontag explores the divergent uses to which documentary photographs can be put, she pays particular attention to the antinationalist, antiwar theme running through the history of the photography of war. It is a mistake to think that this theme emerges only with the opposition to the war in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, Sontag describes a remarkable album of photographs from the First World War. Published in 1924 by Ernst Friedrich, a conscientious objector during the “Great War,” Krieg dem Kriege! (War Against War!) drew upon German military and medical archives to provide a horrific view of the consequences of the industrialized warfare of 1914–1918. Denounced by the German government, Friedrich's book prompt-ed police raids on bookstores and several lawsuits intended to prevent public display of photographs from his book.
The fear that photographs of destroyed villages, mutilated bodies and devastated landscapes would repulse viewers and generate public opposition to warfare has always been a prime concern of governments and military organizations seeking to censor images from the battlefield. Sontag describes the efforts of military officials to control access of journalists and photographers to the battlefield and limit coverage of death and destruction. She describes both the official and tacit norms at work in limiting graphic coverage of particularly brutal deaths to outsiders, enemies and distant foreigners.
Finally, Sontag considers whether the frenzy of contemporary news media induces a kind of compassion fatigue in which photographs of warfare, famine, genocide and other forms of suffering cease to have any effect on viewers. Departing from her previous claims in On Photography (1977), she argues that some photographs maintain their iconic power through repeated viewing, and that it is not “overexposure” that is the source of indifference. Rather, Sontag suggests, we become indifferent toward photographs and the events they record when we conclude that these images have little to do with us and there is nothing we can do.
Regarding the Pain of Others provides a powerful meditation on the crucial role of photography in generating bonds between individuals in relative safety and comfort and humans confronting starvation, mass executions or forced expulsion. These bonds are never guaranteed by the images alone. Photographs require interpretation, and different viewers put particular photographs to distinct uses. Nonetheless, without the work of photojournalists, without the labours of individuals willing to enter danger zones to witness and record what is occurring, the ties between the relatively safe and the profoundly vulnerable would be even more tenuous and fragile than they already are. The human rights activist, the physician leaving the safety of the local community hospital for the field clinics of Médecins Sans Frontières, the international relief worker, the soldier assigned to help broker peace between opposing factions, the photojournalist working in Bosnia or Afghanistan help link those of us in settings of relative safety and comfort to regions of unrelenting poverty, hunger and violence. They remind us of the many episodes of human suffering that are not “accidents” or “acts of nature” but products of deliberate human action. They challenge us to do something, to think, and to stop pretending that the tribulations of others are wholly removed from our own lives.
Leigh Turner Assistant Professor Department of Social Studies of Medicine McGill University Montréal, Que., and 2003/04 Member School of Social Science Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, NJ
Figure.
Photo by: Barbara Sibbald