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
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