Regarding the Pain of Others

By Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $20, 126 pp.)

In a world where the visual takes precedence over the verbal and where history is now captured with a camera, Susan Sontag’s latest book Regarding the Pain of Others is a welcome treatise on the modern media that brings the blur of our image-saturated society into crisp focus. Sontag, a National Book Award-winning author, has long been preoccupied with the politics of picture-taking. In 1977, she published On Photography, a watershed collection of essays in which she documented the camera’s impact on contemporary culture, defining photographs as “a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” The camera itself she called “the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”

Acquisitive, indeed. Since the debut of the daguerreotype in 1839, the shooting hasn’t stopped. It has only accelerated, and Sontag—an icon of intellectualism who’s been immortalized by everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe to Annie Leibowitz (her significant other)—is in a prime position to comment on the phenomenon.

Ever since the giddy ’60s, when her literary reputation first flowered, Sontag has enjoyed a singular relationship with the media. Her achievement of celebrity status during that decade was a true coup for the writing world, made all the more remarkable due to her gender and her status as a cultural critic. The essay, the most modest of genres, became her showcase, a platform for her crystalline critiques of politics, literature, movies and the visual arts. With her liberated style and unmatchable intelligence, Sontag symbolized the era she so expertly analyzed, a time when inclusiveness was in. The collision of highbrow art with consumer society, the intersection of the sophisticated and the subterranean, produced what she called “a new sensibility,” a set of aesthetics so generously extensive it embraced the work of both the Beatles and Bresson. The perfect emblem of this democratization of taste was, of course, the camera—a delightfully egalitarian device, accessible to amateur and expert alike, with an illimitable capacity for reproduction.

Decades later, with Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag evaluates the escalation of images that attended our cultural coming-of-age. While it’s a featherweight book—only 126 pages—the discourse still packs the intellectual punch readers have come to expect from the author. Sontag, who rightly assumes that most of us suffer from ocular overload, sets out to assess the severity of the damage. Examining how the proliferation of visuals has affected the collective psyche, specifically in its response to depictions of violence and war, she revisits issues introduced in On Photography, and some stubborn old questions crop up: Does repeated exposure to scenes of human oppression via the news dull a viewer’s capacity to react? In seeing more, do we see less?

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience,” Sontag says. But humanity’s fascination with the morbid has deep roots, and over the course of the book, the author analyzes classic tableaux of violence, including paintings of the Crucifixion, photos of Auschwitz and pictures of lynchings in the South—images so omnipresent, they require no caption or explanation. She scrupulously considers their intent and presentation, taking into account political contexts, the narratives behind the pictures and the stories of the people who produced them—any extraneous information that might shape a viewer’s impression of an image.

Where visuals from the battlefield are concerned, Sontag says, these issues are particularly important. As the place where politics and art have perhaps the greatest potential to intersect, war photographs are seldom perceived as transparent renderings, absent of motive or agenda. They are, the author writes, “a species of rhetoric” employed to increase the public thirst for war or quench it. They distill and “simplify” the experience of combat, even as they “agitate” and “create the illusion of consensus.”

Exploring the controversial role of journalists, Sontag provides an expert overview of wartime photography, from the earliest official attempt to document a conflict, made by Matthew Brady and his team of cameramen during the Civil War, to Vietnam, the first televised campaign. The Spanish Civil War, one of the first to be covered by journalists in the contemporary sense, produced Robert Capa’s classic 1936 photograph “The Death of a Republican Soldier,” an image now embroiled in questions of authenticity. Although Capa himself insisted that the scene of the falling fighter clutching his gun wasn’t staged, some critics believe it was all an act. “Only starting with the Vietnam War is it virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were setups,” Sontag asserts. “And this is essential to the moral authority of these images.” Without a doubt, to discover that a photograph was faked, that neither history nor spontaneity was ensnared with the snapping of a shutter, sullies a picture’s integrity and appeal—a testament to the deep faith viewers have invested in visual information.

Sontag’s scrutiny of what she calls the “iconography of suffering” spans three centuries and leads to some provocative conclusions about the duty, purpose and power of art. Never impartial, never neutral, these depictions “perform a vital function,” she believes. “The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.” But by the time we see such images, is it already too late? Are we viewing them from too comfortable a vantage point to be genuinely shaken by them? “For photographs to accuse, and possibly alter conduct,” Sontag adds, “they must shock.” Yet how, and how much? And is shock really the best corrective an image has to offer?

These questions are inexhaustible, but then, the author’s goal is not to resolve debates or lay persistent questions to rest. Her aim is to enrich the discussion, to challenge readers, to pique, to rankle, to provoke. Dispatching elegant logic with offhand expertise, Sontag succeeds. Regarding the Pain of Others showcases the astonishing scope of her knowledge and, like much of her nonfiction, is written without ornament or flourish. Its appeal lies not in its prose, but in its ideas. Measured and deliberate, even and unfaltering, Sontag’s is a voice of reason in an age when the visual image has reached its highest point of ascension, when—as the author herself puts it—“to remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.”