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ii, the Pearl harbour attack, followed by the atomic bomb
explosion on hiroshima and Nagasaki. in the 1960s, as a
supporter of the left, she deplored Us brutalities in the
Vietnam War, especially the use of napalm that caused mass
casualties of civilians. she travelled to sarajevo during the
Bosnian war to witness the first genocide in europe since
World War ii. so it’s no surprise that her engagement with
visual archives, especially with press photographs, runs
through the gamut of her work.
strikingly handsome, sontag was also widely
photographed during her lifetime—and even in her last days
by her partner and photographer, annie leibovitz. she
anticipated the camera’s all-pervasive gaze as well as its
ubiquity in public life, long before it became an essential
feature of smart phones.
For sontag, the camera was not only a tool for social and
political change, but also an essential condition of modernity.
‘i t would not be wrong to speak of people having a
compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a
way of seeing,’ she believed. More than forty years ago when
she wrote these words, humanity did not have cameras
installed in handheld devices or a wide choice of social media
platforms to share snapshots of their days, travels or meals on.
Deeply influenced by european avant-garde cinema,
sontag wielded the camera herself for several years, especially
through the 1960s and ’70s, when she made several experi-
mental movies, none of which made a mark, either critically
or commercially. in 1977, she published On Photography, the
now-iconic collection of her essays on the subject, which con-
tinues to be studied as a foundation of photographic thought.
in the last years of her life, she would finish Regarding the Pain
of Others (2003), a companion volume, focusing exclusively on
the depiction of suffering and mutilation in war photography.
Writing at a distance of nearly three decades, sontag
departed from some of her earlier formulations on photogra-
phy, though her discomfort with images of tragedy remained
unabated. Given her investment in conflict zones around the
world, her dilemma is understandable.
For sontag, war photography wasn’t an archive of inert
images that fed the news media. it was rather a ‘quintessen-
tial modern experience’, a service rendered by ‘specialised
tourists’ known as photo-journalists. ‘Perhaps the only people
with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme
order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say,
the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph
was taken—or those who could learn from it,’ she wrote. ‘the
rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.’
Could the assault of self-same images of suffering, day after
day, make us immune to their potency? ‘shock can become
familiar,’ sontag conceded. ‘shock can wear off.’ Yet, she added
a proviso: ‘representations of the Crucifixion do not become
banal to believers, if they really are believers.’ By that logic, the
photograph of alan Kurdi, or of Valeria and her father, cannot
cease to affect true believers of human rights and dignity. nJulia le Duc
captureD the
final moment of
father anD chilD
in fr ame that
gaineD wiDe
currency on
the internet.
SuDDenly, people
anD nationS, who
DiD not have any
obviouS S takeS in
the immigr ation
criSiS, were moveD
by the enor mity of
the moment they
haD witneSS eDap