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REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS

Susan Sontag

Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. In- deed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photo- graph that is not flattering.) Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock.

An example: A few years ago, the public health authorities in Canada, where it had been estimated that smoking kills 45,000 people a year, decided to supplement the warning printed on every pack of cigarettes with a shock photograph-of cancerous lungs, or a stroke-clotted brain, or a damaged heart, or a bloody mouth in acute periodontal distress. A pack with such a picture accompanying the warning about the deleteri- ous effects of smoking would be 60 times more likely to inspire smokers to quit, a research study had somehow calculated, than a pack with only the verbal warning.

Let's assume this is trne. Still one might wonder, for how long? Does shock have term limits? Right now the smokers of Canada are recoiling in disgust, if they do look at these pictures. Will those smoking five years from now still be upset? Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn't, one can not look. People have means to defend them- selves against what is upsetting-in this instance, unpleasant informa- tion for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror iu real life, oue can become habituated to the horror of certain images.

Yet there are cases where repeated exposure to what shocks, saddens, appalls does not use up a full-hearted response. Habituation is not auto- matic, for images (portable, insertable) obey different rules than real life. Representations of the Crucifixion do not become banal to believers, if they really are believers. This is even more true of staged representations. Performances of Chushingura, probably the best-known narrative in all of Japanese culture, can be counted on to make a Japanese audience sob when Lord Asano admires the beauty of the cherry blossoms on his way to where he must commit seppuku-sob each time, no matter how

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often they have followed the story (as a Kabuki or Bunraku play, as a film); the ta'ziyah drama of the betrayal and murder of Imam Hussayn does not cease to bring an Iranian audience to tears no matter how many times they have seen the martyrdom enacted. On the contrary. They weep, in part, because they have seen it many times. People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.

s But do people want to be horrified? Probably not. Still, there are pictures whose power does not abate, in part because one cannot look at them often. Pictures of the ruin of faces that will always testify to a great iniquity survived, at a cost: the faces of horribly disfigured First World War veterans who survived the inferno of the trenches; the faces melted and thickened with scar tissue of survivors of the American atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the faces cleft by machete blows of Tutsi survivors of the genocidal rampage launched by the Hu- tus in Rwanda-is it correct to say that people get used to these?

Indeed, the very notion of atrocity, of war crime, is associated with the expectation of photographic evidence. Such evidence is, usually, of some- thing posthumous: the remains, as it were-the mounds of skulls in Pol Pot's Cambodia, the mass graves in Guatemala and El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. And this posthumous reality is often the keenest of summa- tions. As Hannah Ar~ndt pointed out soon after the end of the Second World War, all the photographs and newsreels of the concentration camps are misleading because they show the camps at the moment the Allied troops marched in. What makes the images unbearable-the piles of corpses, the skeletal survivors-was not at all typical for the camps, which, when they were functioillng, exterminated their inmates systematically (by gas, not starvation and illness), then immediately cremated them. And photographs echo photographs: It was inevitable that the photographs of emaciated Bosnian prisoners at Omarska, the Serb death camp created in northern Bosnia in 1992, would recall memories of the photographs taken in the Nazi death camps in 1945.

Photographs of atrocity illustrate as well as corroborate. Bypassing dis- putes about exactly how many were killed (numbers are often inflated at first), the photograph gives the indelible sample. The illustrative func- tion of photographs leaves opinions, prejudices, fantasies, misinformation untouched. The information that many fewer Palestinians died in the assault on Jenin than had been claimed by Palestinian officials (as the Israelis had said all along) made much less impact than the pictures of the razed center of the refugee camp. 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

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Herera people in Namibia decreed by the German colonial administra- tion in 1904; the Japanese onslaught in China, notably the massacre of nearly 400,000 and the rape of 80,000 Chinese in December 1937, the so-called Rape of Nanking; the rape of some 130,000 women and girls (10,000 of whom committed suicide} by victorious Soviet soldiers un- leashed by their commanding officers in Berlin in 1945-seem more remote. These are memories that few have cared to claim.

The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: Sentiment is more likely to crystalize around a pho- tograph than around a verbal slogan. And photographs help construct- and revise-our sense of a more distant past, with the posthumous shocks engineered by the circulation of hitherto unknown photographs. Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas "memories," and that is, over the long run, a fic- tion. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory-part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is col- lective instruction.

All memory is individual, unreproducible-it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story of how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings. Poster-ready photographs-the mushroom cloud of an A-bomb test, Martin Luther King Jr., speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the astronaut on the moon- are the visual equivalent of sound bites. They commemorate, in no less blunt fashion than postage stamps, Important Historical Moments; indeed, the triumphalist ones (the picture of the A-bomb excepted) become postage stamps. Fortunately, there is no one signature picture of the Nazi death camps.

10 As art has been redefined during a century of modernism as whatever is destined to be enshrined.in some kind of museum, so it is now the destiny of many photographic troves to be exhibited and preserved in museum- like institutions. Among such archives of horror, the photographs of gen· ocide have undergone the greatest institutional development. The point of creating public repositories for these and other relics is to ensure that the crimes they depict will continue to figure in people's consciousness. This is called remembering, but in fact it is a good deal more than that.

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The memory museum in its current proliferation is a product of a way of thinking about, and mourning, the destruction of European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, which came to institutional fruition in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C., and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Photographs and other memorabilia of the Shoah have been committed to a perpetual recirculation, to ensure that what they show will be remembered. Photographs of the suffering and martyrdom of a people are more than reminders of death, of failure, of victimization. They invoke the miracle of survival. To aim at the per- petuation of memories means, inevitably, that one has undertaken the task of continually renewing, of creating, memories-aided, above all, by the impress of iconic photographs. People want to be able to visit- and refresh -their memories. Now many victim peo pies want a memory museum, a temple that houses a comprehensive, chronologically orga- nized, illustrated narrative of their sufferings. Armenians, for example, have long been clamoring for a museum in Washington to institutionalize the memory of the genocide of Armenian people by the Ottoman Turks. But why is there not already, in the nation's capital, which happens to be a city whose population is overwhelmingly African American, a Mu- seum of the History of Slavery? Indeed, there is no Museum of the His- tory of Slavery-the whole story, starting with the slave trade in Africa itself, not just selected parts, such as the Underground Railroad-any- where in the United States. This, it seems, is a memory judged too danger- ous to social stability to activate and to create. The Holocaust Memorial Museum and the future Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial are about events that didn't happen iu America, so the memory-work doesn't risk rousing an embittered domestic population against author- ity. To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States-a unique nation, one without any certifi- ably wicked leaders throughout its entire history-is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful, belief in American exception- alism. The national consensus on American history as a history of prog- ress is a new setting for distressing photographs-one that focuses our attention on wrongs, both here and elsewhere, for which America sees itself as the solution or cure.

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