Regarding the Pain of Others

In Chapter 8, Sontag reflects upon memory—how it works and what it achieves, but also its limits. Valuing the emotional work of survivors, she writes, “Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead” (115).

Yet Sontag is quick to point out that it is not enough simply to remember, and that perhaps we undervalue the role of thinking. In the long run, in the memory bank shared by nations, factions, ethnic groups, too much memory can keep trouble alive: “To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited” (115).

Sontag refers to our “palmtops” as telling us that there is more news than ever, but she reminds us it’s only the spread of news that’s ubiquitous. Yet that doesn’t mean we’ve gained a bigger capacity to contemplate it, nor does it mean the photograph itself can be expected to teach us history and causes: “Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers” (117).

Some photographs may achieve the status of a momento mori—of “secular icons” eliciting meditation, delivering a deeper sense of the real world, but the atmosphere for such an encounter today, Sontag argues, is limited in a society “whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum)” (119). Galleries and museums are social venues where distractions spill over, upon avenues of artworks.

Because the settings that frame photographs have multiplied exponentially since the beginning of photography, most contexts, even art galleries, add little value to perceiving the images. Furthermore, we hardly distinguish today between editorial and advertising photographs, which are often “just as ambitious, artful, slyly casual, transgressive, ironic, and solemn as art photography” (120).

In her final chapter, Sontag returns to novelists (Dreiser and Turgenev) and filmmakers (Shepitko, Hara, and Gance) and their capacity to use narratives to expand time, allowing for depth of feeling in partaking in the pain of others (even if it is only imaginary others and virtual pain). Sontag closes by showing what it means “to think” in relation to images by describing in detail a mural-size Cibachrome transparency, “Dead Troops Talk…,” created by Jeff Wall in 1992 depicting the Red Army in Afghanistan in 1986. Wall never went to Afghanistan and the ambush in his artwork never occurred. Sontag states that “[t]hese dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us” (125). As a singular antiwar image, Sontag finds it “exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power” (123).