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here is a little book review about a book that deals with ethical questions
of war images. --- text is unedited
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
New York, 2003
Susan Sontag assembles a stunning amount of well-researched historical
material on the history of war, savagery, and disaster related images
and discusses the politics, consequence, and ethics around these images.
Even though she also speaks of a small archive of artists and writers
that depicted and render war atrocities graphically in the pre-photographic
period – for ex. Plato’s erotic comments on naked bodies of
killed young men; – her focus is photography in the company of death.
In 1855, the British government dispatched the first (“embedded”)
war photographer to the front lines of the Crimea war with the commission
“to counteract the alarming printed accounts of the unanticipated
risks and privations endured by the British soldiers.” Roger Fenton
was not allowed to photograph death or injury, but was asked to produce
dignified all-male group tableaux to create a positive impression of an
unpopular war. It is amazing how all these historical cases of censorship,
propaganda, and military use of photography resonate in today’s world
of “Operations Iraqi Freedom,” “Operation Enduring Freedom,”
and “War on Terror:” Susan Sontag mentions in a footnote: “Thus,
thirteen years before the destruction of Guernica, Arthus Harris, later
the chief of Bombing Command in the Royal Air Force during the Second
World War, the a young RAF squadron leader in Iraq, described the air
campaign to crush the rebellious natives in this newly acquired British
colony, complete with photographic proof of the success of the mission.
‘The Arab and the Kurd,’ he wrote in 1924, ‘now know what
real bombing means in casualties and damage; they now know that within
forty-five minutes a full-sized village (vide attached photos of Kushan-Al-Ajaza)
can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed by
four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity
for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.” (p. 67) The
author wrote and researched her book before “Shock and Awe”
was in nocturnal green on our TV screens opening just this latest Iraq
war.
Susan Sontag navigates across a rich archive of commonly known, less known,
or unknown histories with known, less known, or unknown images of human
annihilations and sufferings: the American Civil war, the total extermination
of the Herrero people in Namibia by the Germans in 1904, Armenia, WWI,
the Spanish Civil War, Japans onslaught in China in the 1930s, WWII, the
Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, Biafra, Afghanistan, Rwanda,
Sarajevo, Chechnya, 9/11, Jenin, and many more. She discusses a series
of individual war photographers, their images and their circulation and
reception of images. We learn with surprise how many famous images have
been staged for the camera. Sontag in her brilliant writing style: “To
photograph was to compose (with living subjects, to pose), and the desire
to arrange elements in the picture did not vanish because the subject
was immobilized, or immobile. Not surprisingly, many of the canonical
images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or have
had their subjects tampered with.” (p. 53)
All her material is well organized around a series of important questions
concerning the psychological, ideological, and ethical nature of these
images of incomprehensive atrocities inflicted by men. Many of these ethical
questions are also woven in with answers and questions from literary and
philosophical sources, like Virgina Woolf, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil
and many less illustrious figures taking on that subject in books, articles,
and news papers. Spectatorship to a constant stream of calamities from
around the globe is today offered in headline news around the clock. What
are the effects on us? How much can we take? How can we react? How can
we prevent it? When and how turn images of shock into images of clichés?
What is our responsibility towards these images? Does photographic evidence
diminish or neutralize its impact after a time? When do people become
callous, indifferent or cynical? When do we switch channels? Who has the
privilege to be able to switch channels in order to escape “tissue(s)
of horrors” (Baudelaire)? What is the best media to communicate authenticity?
A book, a newspaper, a museum, a news channel. Is there such a thing like
collective memory since memory is individual? Why isn’t there a museum
of African American slavery in the USA yet? Etc.
Sontag insists that remembering is an ethical act and sees in memory “the
only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering
is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans…. Heartlessness
and amnesia seem to go together.” (p. 115) Sontag who spent longer
periods of time in Sarajevo during its worst time is a strongly defending
war photojournalism against accusations of “war tourism” and
theories that see them as unreal and vulgar. She points out that these
war photographers risk their lives to take these pictures. Sontag wants
atrocious images to haunt us (p. 115) and believes that they keep doing
so in spite of today’s news industry and its built in mechanisms
of (auto)-censorship. She also vehemently refuses the “death of reality”
rhetoric associated with Guy Debord who makes reality of events be depending
on spectacle, Jean Baudrillard who speaks of images as simulated realities
and André Glucksmann who tried to separate totally the happenings
on the media from the happenings on the ground. Sontag counters: “It
universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living
in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment
… It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering
in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones
in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being
spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain.
Just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the
sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of
news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and
terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are
far from inured to what they see on television. They don’t have the
luxury of patronizing reality.” (p.110 f)
“Regarding the Pain of Others” is not only addressing the distance
and proximity the spectator has to tragic events via news and media representation
and its spin but also indicates ways to relate to current political events
with the understanding and the distance of a historian and a philosopher
on image ecology. What makes Susan Sontag’s books so strikingly useful
is precisely her historical and ethico-philosophical approach to news
and war coverage that allows us to handle today’s representations
more responsibly, so we don’t have to resort to ignorance, cynicism
or callousness.
rainer ganahl april 2004
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