Regarding the Pain of Others - Sontag

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag bounces around and between the issues and complexities that arise when things like war, art, and entertainment are confused with and for each other in the world of photography.  She marches briefly through many histories, mostly from the 20^th century, including that of war, paintings, and photography.  She includes, but refuses to focus on, disenchanting tales (like one of the staged Iwo Jima victory), and instead exerts her efforts on the many and varied influences and affects that these photographs have and have had, asserting that a photograph’s caption or publication date can grossly change our understanding of the photograph itself, can grossly effect a photograph’s reception, despite the prevalent idea that photography, the photographer, and the photograph are all objective objects, i.e., those tangible things which both are real and depict reality.  Though at times it seems as if Sontag is simply trying to dethrone the role of photography (particularly war photography) from its high position of authoritative story telling, where photographs behave as factual pieces of evidence, she is actually doing much more than this, something far less naïve.  Instead of advocating for the blind discrediting of photography and the re-positioning of writing and painting to its previously, (perhaps) more highly esteemed location, she is actually, quite importantly, encouraging the reader to see more frequently and more critically the complications that lie between products of reality, perceptions of products of reality, and the experience of reality itself.  She is called to re-iterate what has become commonplace in postmodern thought (though not yet in postmodern living), that all is subjective, all is valuable and questionable, all is worthy and vulnerable…that to question, investigate, and challenge, is a noble thing, a necessary thing, and that we should never equate.  Her punch line at the end let’s us know that although photographs might seem to bring us a closer to a conflict, and do have a specific and special role in presenting conflict and world events to us, they can never substitute or adequately represent the event itself.  That the photograph (like all things, essentially) exists as part, as a very small part, of much larger systems, happenings, histories, and circumstances.  The book is brilliantly written, quickly read, incredibly appropriate, and highly recommended.