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If you are interested in images' role in public perception of events--particularly suffering and tragedy--you might look to read Susan Sontag's essay collection
by rexpop 3y ago
If you are interested in images' role in public perception of events--particularly suffering and tragedy--you might look to read Susan Sontag's essay collection "Regarding the Pain of Others," published in 2003:
> To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.
> a single photograph or filmstrip claims to represent exactly what was before the camera’s lens. A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what?
> Indeed, the very notion of atrocity, of war crime, is associated with the expectation of photographic evidence. Such evidence is, usually, of something posthumous.
> And, of course, atrocities that are not secured in our minds by well-known photographic images, or of which we simply have had very few images—the total extermination of the Herero people in Namibia decreed by the German colonial administration in 1904; the Japanese onslaught in China, notably the massacre of nearly four hundred thousand, and the rape of eighty thousand, Chinese in December 1937, the so-called Rape of Nanking; the rape of some one hundred and thirty thousand women and girls (ten thousand of whom committed suicide) by victorious Soviet soldiers unleashed by their commanding officers in Berlin in 1945—seem more remote. These are memories that few have cared to claim.
> Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting—in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. While this is mostly a good piece of writing, in the real world handmade images (and handwritten notes) are, like photographs, potentially evidence, and the issues raised with photographs are the reasons both photographs and hand-written/hand-drawn items (and all other physical items) as evidence tend to demand supporting (and admit opposing) testimonial and physical evidence of provenance (and, the physical evidence offered for this purpose has the same features, such that ultimately, it all rests on testimonial evidence of provenance.) I also don't think the first parr of the sentence is true: pictures may be supposed to show, but pictures have been noted for their evocative power long before this piece was written—pictures are in certaim circumstances understood to show, and under other and frequently overlapping circumstances to evoke; there is certainly a common danger in mistaking evocative power for also indicating informative power, but few anywhere have denied the existence of the evocative power of photography.
- rexpop 3y agoThat's a fair critique. One might ask "supposed by whom, exactly?" In English, supposition too frequently implements the unforgivable passive voice.