Connected to that article, is Sontag's own very fine acceptance speech
for the German Booksellers' Peace Prize: thoughtful, questioning, still
necessary:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1031
Doug
On 3-Jan-05, at 2:24 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> Great tribute to Sontag, reflecting on the tsunami and other
> disasters, by
> Rebecca Solnit at Tom Dispatch
>
> http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2095
>
> Sontag wrote beautifully about the images that we see, particularly
> those of
> suffering and of war. Now I wish she had said more about what we don't
> see,
> about how photographs must be weighed against the obliviousness they
> dispel
> as well as against the callousness they might generate, the
> exploitation
> they might cause, and the perils of interpretation. In her most recent
> book,
> Regarding the Pain of Others , Sontag writes, "Being a spectator of
> calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern
> experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half's
> worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as
> journalists. Wars
> are now also living room sights and sounds." And then she took up her
> old
> argument, in On Photography , that there should be an "ecology of
> images" to
> keep "compassion, stretched to its limits" from "going numb." She
> argues
> with her former self, "There isn't going to be an ecology of images. No
> Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its
> ability
> to shock." But the images of Abu Ghraib were shocking anyway, and the
> images
> of the tsunami are harrowing.
>
> What is now most striking now about Sontag's argument is that it is
> not so
> much about photography but about compassion, an emotion and an ethic
> that
> photographs can awaken or undermine. Elsewhere in Regarding the Pain of
> Others , she writes, "Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be
> translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with
> the
> feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been
> communicated.
> People don't become inured to what they are shown -- if that's the
> right way
> to describe what happens -- because of the quantity of images dumped on
> them. It is passivity that dulls feeling."
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
We both know the reason why you called
So stop wastin’ time tryin’ to soften up my fall
I know you wanna sweeten up the taste
But if you don’t mind I’ll just take my sorrow straight
Iris DeMent
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