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Susan Sontag: from On Photography to Regarding the Pain of Others    

Susan Sontag’s On Photography is a collection of essays that originally appeared in the New York Review of Books.  Sontag explores photography from the perspective of the viewers, subjects, and photographers.  She considers photographs as objects, photography as a medium, the evolution of the technology, the use of the camera by amateur picture-takers and professional image-makers.  This collection is firmly grounded in the 1970s and so reflects Sontag’s turn toward a postmodern critique of our “image-world.”  She argues that we have become “image-junkies” consuming photographs that have translated all experience into image (On Photography, 20).  Photographs both allow access to a privileged vision of the world that would have been unthinkable without the camera while at the same time mediate our understanding of what we see and translate our experience into a depersonalized encounter with only an image.  Sontag suggests that the excess of images in our world have inured us to the power of photography so that “the image-surfeited are likely to find sunsets corny; they now look, alas, too much like photographs” (On Photography, 77).  Sontag concludes by considering the difficulty of distinguishing between images and reality in her current cultural moment.

Written thirty years after the publication of her foundational text On Photography, Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others reconsiders many of her earlier assertions as she writes about images of atrocity within the context of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In this 2003 collection of essays, Sontag explores the history of documenting horror and argues that “our failure” in the face of images of atrocity is a failure of “imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind” (Regarding, 8).   Sontag’s insistence that we have failed to hold reality it mind reverses her original assertions about “image-surfeited” society.  This reversal seems all the more surprising in that her recent work is written within the context of the rise of digital photography and digital manipulation of the photographic image.  Miles Orvell, photography scholar, labels our current period the “post-photographic”—a moment in which digital images blur the distinction between what is real and what may be imagined.  What is most significant for Orvell about post-photographic images—images that seem to move beyond a Barthesian insistence that the “photograph always carries its referent with itself”—is that they still rely on the reality of the referent (Barthes, 5).  In other words, what makes these photographs powerful is the persistence of the referent in the image that makes ‘real’ what can only be imagined.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag ends by asserting the failure of the photograph to truly represent the reality of atrocity.  As Sontag argues, the photograph can only document the pain—can only prove to us that the atrocity is “real,” but cannot communicate pain because the viewer is unable to “understand.  We don’t get it.  We truly can’t imagine what it was like” (Regarding, 125).  The horror of these images of atrocity, then, comes not from their aestheticizing pain and not from the possibility that they may be digitally altered and therefore ‘unreal,’ but that these images may be only real.  The horror of images of pain and death is in their refusal of fantasy; the viewer cannot imagine himself or herself into the photograph.

In some ways, Regarding the Pain of Others is a stark reversal of her earlier work On Photography.  Originally arguing that we have become inured to the spectacle of suffering in a culture mediated through images and inundated with representations of violence, Sontag now castigates the audacity of presuming everyone a spectator and so suggesting “perversely, unseriously that there is no real suffering in the world” (Regarding, 110).  The translation of suffering into spectacle is repugnant, but assuming that suffering is only spectacle is violently dismissive.  Postmodern claims about the spectacle of images mean nothing to a person being tortured.  It is very difficult to argue away the objectivity of pain. 

What is difficult, as Sontag indicates, is to truly communicate the pain of others.  Here she returns to an earlier assertion from On Photography that “only that which narrates can make us understand” (On Photography, 21).  She notes a failure of communication and her solution for this failure in 1973 was the caption.  This attempt at communication through captioning, tenuous as it was for Sontag thirty years prior, no longer seems an option by 2003.  While regarding the pain of others, we simply “can’t understand, can’t imagine” (Regarding, 126). Pain defies accurate representation.  The problem with regarding the pain of others is that we can only look; we cannot understand.  Perhaps we are in a post-photographic world not because the photograph has failed to capture reality, but because the photograph of pain can only capture reality.  These photographs are not failures of reality; they are failures of fantasy.  They do not fail to represent ‘real’ pain; they fail to allow us to imagine it.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland.  Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.  New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Trans. Richard Howard.

Orvell, Miles.  American Photography.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Sontag, Susan.  On Photography.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.  Rpt. 1977.

______.  Regarding the Pain of Others.  New York: Picador, 2003.