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Literature and Medicine 22.2 (2003) 257-261



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Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others.New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 131 pp. Clothbound, $20.00.

Susan Sontag has been, since the 1970s, one of the leading public literary figures in the United States. In addition to six novels, two film scripts, and a play, she has written eight books of essays. Two of the latter are widely cited meditations on medically relevant topics. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, books that are taught to medical students in courses in the medical humanities and social sciences, illustrate the power of meaning to shape experiences of pain and suffering, often in ways that create problems for patients and practitioners.

Sontag also wrote one of the earliest and most penetrating and influential interpretations of photography in modern society, On Photography. In the early 1990s, during the horrific civil war in Bosnia, Sontag traveled to Sarajevo, from where she penned powerful pieces on the brutal effects of the fighting and the social forces that fueled its explosions of inhuman political violence, pieces that also burned with passionate criticism of the seeming incapacity of Europe, the United States, and international agencies to intervene effectively to stop the bloodshed, psychological trauma, and societal destruction.

All of these themes come together in a powerful and disturbing way in her brilliant new book, Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag focuses on photographs of pain and suffering that are caused by "hellish events," especially war (p. 26). Photographs, she avers, unite opposites: objectivity and a special point of view. Sontag insists "to photograph is to frame, to frame is to exclude . . . it has always been possible for a photograph to misrepresent" (p. 46). Yet, in common-sense realism, "A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence" (p. 47).

Sontag reminds us of Ernst Friedrich's Krieg dem Krieg! (War Against War!), a book of photographs from the First World War that was deemed unpublishable by German censors while the war was being fought because of the horror the photos portray, including close-ups of [End Page 257] soldiers with difficult-to-look-at gaping facial wounds. The purpose of this picture book was to shock readers with graphic evidence of the immense destructiveness of the Great War, a war in which 1.7 million Germans died. Here photography not only acknowledges social suffering but also offers a protest. That this protesting image and the many others used by antiwar activists offered no serious resistance to the gathering storm of fascism and Nazism that only a generation later would create a second world war, with at least fifty million deaths, reminds us soberingly of the limits of images to prevent the very real dangers in human experience. To be sure, Sontag also reminds us that images of horror and gore can feed a prurient voyeurism that many of us are capable of experiencing.

Sontag joins earlier critics of the famous war photographer Robert Capa's iconic photograph of the Spanish Civil War depicting a Republican soldier at the very instant he is killed by enemy fire. Other evidence suggests that this universally recognized photo was almost certainly staged and may have recorded a training exercise. Many of the most memorable pictures from the Second World War were indeed staged, including that quintessential picture of American military bravery that conjures patriotic sentiments each Veteran's Day, the photo of American servicemen raising the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima in the winter of 1945. Live television broadcasts, such as those by "embedded" reporters in the Iraq War, may prevent staging; still, the ability to frame and interpret make point of view as crucial to photography now as in the past, as anyone comparing images from Iraq on American and Arab television can attest.

One widely cited picture of human suffering that Sontag does not discuss, but that makes many of her points, is a picture that won the South African photojournalist, Kevin Carter, a Pulitzer Prize. 1...

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