Books: Picture imperfect

By John Ziebell

No single book has had a greater impact on how our culture interprets the photographic act than Susan Sontag's deceptively slender 1977 collection On Photography. Nearly three decades after she addressed the process and its product, Sontag revisits photography--specifically, the representations of war and social trauma that come to us as "news"--in Regarding the Pain of Others.

Regarding the Pain of Others is an extended exploration of images of suffering and the actual horrors that they mediate. The title may not be the catchiest to hit bookstores in recent memory, but it's certainly an accurate description of the text. It also says something about Sontag's approach to pop philosophy, which is that a work examining moral issues can be serious and accessible at the same time. Her eloquent prose is often understated but always lucid, and showcases an uncanny ability to lace plain-spoken clarity with the kind of rhetorical gems that make pundits jealous: "Nobody who really studies history can take politics altogether seriously," and "The whole point of television is that one can switch channels."

Sontag's argument here rests on the premise that contemporary human memory is keyed to what still photography does best. Although we are surrounded by streaming visual information, what we invariably call up from the input we've experienced are isolated images. "[M]emory freeze frames; its basic unit is the single image." And while society has come to grant photographs an inherent evidentiary credibility, we also recognize that there's a level of subjectivity behind every image. This becomes critical in considering how our culture reads the images that come to us--as documentation, misinformation or something in between.

"Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering...of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists."

Sontag goes on to provide a brief but fascinating history of reportage, from painting, which was meant to be instructional and recognized as such, through the early photographs of the latter 1800s, which were privileged because of a perceived ability to "record" rather than "imagine" the acts they represented: "Paintings say something like this might, could, happen; photos say it did, and this is how we should see it."

It was commonly known that pioneer war photographers like Fenton, Beato, Brady and O'Sullivan staged, managed or otherwise manipulated almost every image they created; by the Vietnam War, Sontag argues, it was the subjects, not the photographers, who were often controlling the rhetoric. Even now, in the Photoshop age, the greatest transgression a photographer can commit is not mechanically manipulating a picture, but manipulating the emotional responses of its viewers.

Nor does Sontag hesitate to provide postmodern thumbnails that illustrate the complicity of the audience itself; just watch people slowing down for car wrecks on the freeway. "Calling such wishes `morbid' suggests a rare aberration," she states, "but the attraction to such sights is not rare..." This is a behavior pattern she finds examples of as far back as the dialogues of Plato, a good attempt at explaining if not excusing our actions in this regard.

As befits a philosophical meditation, it's the murky areas--the morass of unknowable intentionality, intentions and intended use--that become morally sticky. Who owns anguish? To what end? How much, or little, does illustration differ from exploitation? There's more, all insightful, all engaging, and in the end the book is asking a simple question: Do you see things carefully enough? It's a message that seems sort of timely.