Regarding the Pain of Others (12 page)

For information about Roger Fenton, I am indebted to Natalie M. Houston, “Reading the Victorian Souvenir: Sonnets and Photographs of the Crimean War,”
The Yale Journal of Criticism
vol. 14, no. 2 (Fall 2001). I owe the information that there were two versions of Fenton’s “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” to Mark Haworth-Booth of the Victoria and Albert Museum; both are reproduced in
The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War,
by Ulrich Keller (Routledge, 2001). The account of the British reaction to the photograph of unburied British dead at the Battle of Spion Kop comes from
Early War Photographs,
compiled by Pat Hodgson (New York Graphic Society, 1974). It was William Frassanito who established, in his
Gettysburg: A Journey in Time
(Scribner’s, 1975), that Alexander Gardner must have changed the location of the body of a dead Confederate soldier for a photograph. The quote from Gustave Moynier comes from David Rieff,
A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis
(Simon & Schuster, 2002).

I continue to learn, as I have for many years, from conversations with Ivan Nagel.

By Susan Sontag

FICTION

The Benefactor

Death Kit

I, etcetera

The Way We Live Now

The Volcano Lover

In America

ESSAYS

Against Interpretation

Styles of Radical Will

On Photography

Illness As Metaphor

Under the Sign of Saturn

AIDS and Its Metaphors

Where the Stress Falls

FILM SCRIPTS

Duet for Cannibals

Brother Carl

PLAY

Alice in Bed

A Susan Sontag Reader

Praise for Susan Sontag’s
Regarding the Pain of Others

“I suspect Susan Sontag has written a book others thought of writing but chickened out of … Timely as it is, Sontag’s extended meditation on the imagery of war in
Regarding the Pain of Others
is guaranteed to make some readers uneasy … Sontag is a moralist, as anyone who thinks about violence against the innocent is liable to become. The time she spent in Sarajevo under fire gives her the authority … If photography is a form of knowledge, writing about it with critical discernment and passion, as she does, is bound to make trouble for every variety of intellectual and moral smugness.”

—Charles Simic,
The New York Review of Books

“Susan Sontag’s
On Photography
was published in 1977. It became, almost instantly, a bible … Its readers are not just the university young … [but also] the men and women at the sharp end—those you find edging up bullet-scarred streets with Nikons dangling around their flak jackets have read Sontag too. They ask themselves constantly why they are doing the work they do, and to whom they are doing it, and whether anyone cares whether they do it or not. If any one person provided the words for that self-questioning, it was Susan Sontag. She wrote that book when the images of Vietnam were still fresh. Now, as the photographers line up for accreditation to yet another war she has returned to the subject … We cannot yet know which images are going to freeze-frame this [the Iraq] conflict in popular memory, but this wise and somber book warns that some older styles of antiwar photography may be powerless this time.”

—Neal Ascherson,
Los Angeles Times Book Review

“As the images come out of Iraq, Sontag’s plainspoken, self-questioning book furnishes meditation of a high order … her oscillating and humbled mindfulness restores photography to its place in the humanist tradition … [Sontag] has honored beauty and justness, and she has chronicled how they were almost extinguished in the most devastatingly genocidal century to date. Without her, the dead Iraqi child on al-Jazeera would be just one of many, a signpost pointing toward the twin nihilisms of inevitability and ignorance.”

—Lorraine Adams,
The Washington Post

“
Regarding the Pain of Others
is not simply a repetition of the earlier writings on photography; rather, it is a genuine return to the source of the energy driving Sontag’s critical prose from the 1960s and ’70s.… A longtime reader of Sontag notices that her discussion of Matthew Brady’s images of the Civil War—or photojournalistic coverage of downtown New York, autumn 2001—land her in the middle of familiar questions about the history of sensibility in a culture shaped by the mechanical reproduction of imagery …
Regarding the Pain of Others
invites, and rewards, more than one reading.”

—Scott McLemee,
Newsday

“A timely meditation on politics and ethics … extraordinary … Sontag’s insight and erudition are profound.”

—Carlo Wolff,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“[A] powerful meditation on the imagery of suffering and horror … As strong a candidate for the Nobel Prize as any living American.”

—Jeff Simon,
The Buffalo News

“[Sontag] is at ease in the history of photography and in the history of painting, in the analysis of history and in the analysis of the media, and she never slides into pedantry. Nor does she seek to force her ideas upon us, but rather to make us reflect, with some melancholy, upon a range of troublesome topics.”

—Tzvetan Todorov,
The New Republic

Susan Sontag is the author of four novels,
The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover,
and
In America,
which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories,
I, etcetera;
several plays, including
Alice in Bed
and
Lady from the Sea;
and seven works of nonfiction, among them
On Photography,
which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism,
Illness as Metaphor,
and
Where the Stress Falls.
Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work; in 2003, she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS
. Copyright © 2003 by Susan Sontag. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sontag, Susan, 1933–

Regarding the pain of others / Susan Sontag.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-42219-9

1. War and society. 2. War photography—Social aspects. 3. War in art—Social aspects. 4. Photojournalism—Social aspects. 5. Atrocities. 6. Violence. I. Title.

HM554.S65 2003

303.6—dc21

2002192527

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

eISBN 9781466853577

First eBook edition: August 2013