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Summary
Summary
A brilliant, clear-eyed new consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects
Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity--a daily commonplace in our "society of spectacle." But are viewers inured -or incited--to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock?
In her first full-scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001.
As John Berger wrote when On Photography was first published, "All future discussions or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." Sontag's new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of "information", "news," "art," and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will be equally essential. It will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world.
Author Notes
Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford University. She was the author of 17 books including four novels, a collection of short stories, several plays, and eight works of nonfiction. Her novels are The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction. On Photography received the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and Art in America. She also wrote and directed four feature films and stage plays in the United States and Europe. She died from leukemia on December 28, 2004 at the age of 71.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Twenty-six years after the publication of her influential collection of essays On Photography (1977), Sontag (In America) reconsiders ideas that are "now fast approaching the status of platitudes," especially the view that our capacity to respond to images of war and atrocity is being dulled by "the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images" in our rapaciously media-driven culture. Sontag opens by describing Virginia Woolf's essay on the roots of war, "Three Guineas," in which Woolf described a set of gruesome photographs of mutilated bodies and buildings destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. Woolf wondered if there truly can be a "we" between man and woman in matters of war. Sontag sets out to reopen and enlarge the question. "No `we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain," she writes. The "we" that Sontag has come to be much more aware of in the decades since On Photography is the world of the rich. She has come to doubt her youthful contention that repeated exposure to images of suffering necessarily shrivels sympathy, and she doubts even more the radical yet influential spin that others put on this critique-that reality itself has become a spectacle. "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle... universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world...." Sontag reminds us that sincerity can turn a mere spectator into a witness, and that it is the heart rather than fancy rhetoric that can lead the mind to understanding. (Mar.) FYI: In a letter published in the January 13, 2003, issue of the New Yorker, Woolf scholar Jane Marcus asserts that Woolf never published the horrible war photos that she described-they appeared only in later editions of her antiwar essay. Instead, Woolf substituted images of a general, an archbishop, a judge-wordlessly insisting that her readers constantly consider the men of power who make wars. Marcus assumes that Sontag was drawing her conclusions from a later edition without realizing that she was crying Woolf. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Sontag, one of our most perceptive and valiant thinkers, offered a seminal critique of camera-mediated images in On Photography. Now, 25 years later, photographs and video of the bloody consequences of terrorism and war routinely fill the media, and Sontag offers a fresh, meticulous, and deeply affecting dissection of the role images of suffering play in our lives. Do photographs and television footage of the injured and dead serve as "shock therapy" or merely elicit a momentary shudder before they're forgotten? Do images of systematic violence engender compassion and antiwar sentiments or arouse hunger for revenge? Writing with electrifying clarity and conciseness, Sontag traces the evolution of the "iconography of suffering" from paintings by Goya, to photographs of concentration camps, to the first live and in-color war coverage to rage across television screens, that of the Vietnam War, to images of the destruction of the World Trade Center taken by amateurs and professionals alike. Sontag parses the difference in our response to images of terrorism at home versus abroad, and forthrightly addresses our pornographic fascination with images of the wounded and dead. Ultimately, Sontag, scrupulous in her reasoning and exhilarating in her arguments, arrives at a paradox: although we're inundated more than ever before by stark visual evidence of the "pain of others," we've yet to increase our capacity to do something about it. --Donna Seaman
Choice Review
In this clear and nuanced work, published 26 years after her landmark work On Photography (CH, Sep'78), Sontag returns to an examination of the effect of visual imagery on Western culture--specifically the effect of violent imagery. Using examples across history including imagery from the American Civil War, WW I, Nazi death camps, and lynchings of black Americans in the South and culminating with 9/11, Sontag successfully supports her argument that despite being seemingly oversaturated with violent images, viewers continue to be both drawn to and shocked and affected by them. Sontag observes, "War was and still is the most irresistible--and picturesque--news." What is particularly noteworthy is that the author makes her case so convincingly without reproducing any visual images in her book (except for the cover, plate 36 of The Disasters of War, 1810-20, by Francisco Goya y Lucientes). Instead, she uses the works of writers and artists including Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, and Virginia Woolf to build her argument. This book is welcome and timely. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. C. Baker Baylor University
Kirkus Review
With a glance back at the essays in On Photography (1977), the eminent intellectual, critic, and writer cobbles together a defense of war photography--with a result that's as much maunder as miracle. The slightly superior, ever-unflappable tone will be familiar here to Sontag readers, as will be the wonderful aperÇus that come along in a kind of pearls-on-a-string parade--"All memory is individual, unreproducible--it dies with each person," for example, or "To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture," or "Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us." Familiar, too, is the Sontagian pleasure of watching a mind roam through fields of history and reading--as the thinker touches down one moment in Plato, at another in Leonardo or Edmund Burke, all the while keeping up knowledgeably detailed references to politics and conflict from the Crimean war up to Somalia and Bosnia. And yet, for all its author's capabilities, the essay remains only imperfectly satisfying. From Matthew Brady to now, photos of death and war have raised the question of whether prurience or sympathy is raised in the viewer of such images, degradation and moral numbing on the one hand or any kind of useful understanding on the other. Sontag reviews and explores this old question, and her answer, though without doubt the right one--"Let the atrocious images haunt us"--leads her to unexpected banalities ("There is simply too much injustice in the world") and an unfocused ending that all but randomly touches on great matters--whether the mass media create passivity, for example--and just as inexplicably glances away from them ("But it's probably not true that people are responding less"), leaving the greatest question--whether there is any "way to guarantee contemplative . . . space for anything now"--nudged at only lightly, and left to slumber on. Moments of brilliance and wonder amid the generally disappointing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The impact of violent images: Sontag's first full-length work on imagery since her acclaimed On Photography 25 years ago. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
