Susan Sontag - Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

Susan Sontag
No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Susan Sontag
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

Susan Sontag
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

Susan Sontag
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

Susan Sontag
The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

Susan Sontag
War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

Susan Sontag
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato's Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.

Susan Sontag
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.

Susan Sontag