The paperback edition of Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others arrived in my hands during an appropriately ugly phase in our war with Iraq. In April 2004 images of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi captives at the Abu Ghraib prison flooded the media. Worse pictures followed as civilian contractors were mutilated or beheaded by Iraqi militants on camera. Video deemed too grisly to appear on TV ended up in the homes of the curious via the Internet. The news was powerful and disturbing.
What role do images like these play in winning or losing a distant war? Would Islamic militant Abu Musab al-Zarqari have decapitated Nicholas Berg if there hadn't been a video camera there to document the horrible deed? And "is there an antidote to the powerful seductiveness of war?" Interesting questions in a post 9/11 world where terrorist attacks are expressly designed to play well on TV.
Regarding the Pain of Others is Sontag's thoughtful follow up to her 1977 classic On Photography. It's a photography book without photographs that explores how wartime images shape our perceptions of distant wars. Her descriptions of images from the Civil War to the current war with Iraq are evocative and direct. Some are familiar. Others less so. But all serve to raise questions about human nature, our ambivalent relationship to atrocity and the power of images to articulate the horrors of war.
Philosophical, feminist and dense with ideas- Regarding the Pain of Others is a timeless book that addresses a difficult topic in a most timely way. Accessible without being an easy read this book is highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand more about how images work to shape ideas, both personal and political, about suffering and war.
