Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag (2003), digested by Diane Smyth

This was Sontag's update to On Photography (see above). The intervening years hadn’t softened her stance and Sontag pulls no punches in her critique of images of suffering, “those professional, specialised tourists known as journalists” who make them, and our culpability in looking at them. 

She starts by tracing the history of images of suffering, arguing that Christian depictions of martyrdom historically gave way to something more secular that saw pain as something to be deplored. Photographs were quickly pressed into service; justified by the idea they could advocate for change. 

Photographs were, and still are, she argues, unequal to the task, because they turn disaster into universal, ineffectual denunciations of human cruelty or suffering. Each image is framed by the person who makes it, and “to frame is to exclude”. 

Feeling powerless to change what they see, viewers quickly become immune to images of suffering or - worse - take a prurient interest in them. And because we are bombarded with such images, we no longer recognise them as records of real events. 

It’s gloomy reading for committed photojournalists and Sontag has little to offer by way of comfort, other than to suggest that narrative texts, longer portfolios of images, and artworks are more likely to mobilise a viewer (or reader) to action against suffering, or any kind of understanding of it. 

In her own words:

"Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialised tourists known as journalists. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called ‘news’, features conflict and violence…to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view." 

"The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it." 

"Making suffering loom larger, by globalising it, may spur people to feel they ought to ‘care’ more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention." 

How to sound as if you've read it:

Photographs of suffering don't rouse viewers to action because they universalise pain rather than explaining what could be changed. There’s no hope, so stop being a voyeur and take action instead.