SUSAN SONTAG: REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS

Failure to read the article and posting the 3 quotes will be considered an incomplete assignment and graded accordingly (at best a 69).

Below the questions are photographs for references. Some are made by photographers mentioned in the article, some are iconic photographs that have become part of photo history.

1. Read Susan Sontag’s essay Regarding the Pain of Others. Although I would encourage you to go through the entire book, I require that you read page 59 to 98 (starting with Chapter 5).

2. Find 3 iconic quotes or paragraphs, and comment on them (page 59 to 98). Make sure to identify on which pages you found them.

3. Answer each of the following questions:

- What is this obsession and fascination with the depiction of crime, pain and horrors, bordering on voyeurism? Are we becoming immune to shock or at least being desensitized over time? Do people want to look at horror or even get pleasure out of it?

- Has our society become anesthetized by and is apathetic to the horror depicted on a daily basis on TV and in the social media?

- Does our incapacity to deal with distant events of horror leave us indifferent when we are not directly affected by them?

- Why do people post images of cruelty online for the whole world to see and think they can get away with it? For example, in 2013, two high school football stars from Ohio posted a video on YouTube of the rape of a drugged and unconscious girl. When the crime came to light, it split the town in half between people defending the players and others who wanted them to be prosecuted. There is a screenshot in the picture section below.

- American soldiers photographed the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, and then passed the images amongst themselves. These pictures seemed to the soldiers nothing more than boys and girls having fun, or as the radio personality Rush Limbaugh said: “You know, these people [the US soldiers] are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time. You ever heard of emotional release?” What do these images say about empathy, power and humanity? Look at the images of Abu Ghraib.

- What is the role and responsibility of the photographer in taking and disseminating images of war and cruelty? Do they need to censor how and what they photograph? Look at the images by Robert Capa, Eddie Adams, Nick Ut, Susan Meiselas, Richard Drew, Ron Haviv, Kevin Carter, Alan Kurdi, James Nachtwey.

- The great photo journalist Sebastião Salgado has often been accused of producing “spectacular, beautifully composed pictures” of misery that were aesthetically too pleasing to give the subject matter its full weight. Does somebody like him need to forgo his style and create conventional looking photographs? Look at the Salgado images.

Robert Capa, Death of a loyalist militiaman, Cordoba, Spain, September 1936

Eddie Adams, execution a Viet Cong prisoner, Saigon, Vietnam,1968

Nick Ut, kids running away from a South Vietnamese napalm strike that mistakenly hit their village instead of nearby North Vietnamese troops, 1972

Susan Meiselas, "Cuesta del Plomo", hillside outside Managua, a well-known site of many assassinations carried out by the National Guard, 1981

Richard Drew, Falling Man, World Trade Center, 9.11.2001

Ron Haviv, Serb kicking a Muslim woman who had been shot by Serb forces. Bosnia, 1992

Kevin Carter, Starving Child and Vulture, Sudan,1993

Alan Kurdi, Nilufer Demir, drowned 3-year-old Syrian refugee, 2015

James Nachtwey, a Hutu man whose face was mutilated by the Hutu militia, who suspected him of sympathizing with the Tutsi Rebels, Rwanda, 1994

Steubenville (Ohio) Rape, January, 2013

American soldiers photographed the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, 2003

Sebastiao Salgado, Starved Child Looking for Food in the Region of the Former Lake Faguibine, Mali

Sebastiao Salgado, Children's Ward in the Korem Refugee Camp, Ethiopia, 1984

Sebastiao Salgado, draped in blankets to keep out the cold morning wind, refugees wait outside Korem camp, Ethiopia, 1984

Sebastiao Salgado, blinded by sandstorms and chronic eye infections, this woman is waiting for food distribution, Mali, 1985