(2 Pages) How does Sontag present the argument that pictures (photographs) take on different meanings and interpretations based on who is doing the viewing? Give specific examples.
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Sontagphotos.pptSusan Sontag
Images referred to in
Regarding the Pain of Others
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1. How does Sontag demonstrate the intersection of "news" art, and understanding in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster?
2. How does Sontag point out that pictures can inspire dissent, foster violence, or create apathy, evoking a long history of the representation of the pain of others?
3. According to Sontag, how has the camera transformed vision and sensibility?
4. Explain what Sontag means by: "the understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of [war photographers'] images.”
5. How does Sontag present the argument that pictures take on different meanings and interpretations based on who is doing the viewing?
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- A novelist, philosopher, essayist, movie director and playwright.
- Her essays, which are by far her most complete aesthetic achievement, many are devoted to Film, either to single movies (like Bergman's "Persona", Godard's "Vivre sa vie", Syberberg's "Hitler, a Film from Germany", but also Chaplin's "The Dictator" and Kubrick's "Doctor Strangelove"
Longtime companion of photographer Annie Leibovitz (from the mid 1980s until Sontag's death).
MacArthur Fellow from 1990 to 1995.
2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
Honorary citizen of Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia.
National Book Critics Circle Award for the book "On Photography" published in (1978)
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- “Cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms…”
- “Perhaps no work of art ‘is’ art. It can only ’become’ art, when it is part of the pas…”
- “I think it was rock & roll the reason I got divorced. I think it was Bill Haley and the Comets and Chuck Berry that made me decide to get a divorce and leave the academic world.”
- “The youngest of the arts is also the most heavily burdened with memory. Cinema is a time machine. Movies preserve the past, resurrect the beautifil dead; present, intact, vanished or ruined environments; enbody without ironu styles and fashions that seem funny today; solemnly ponder irrelevant or naive problems. The historical particularity of the reality registered on celluloid is so vivid that practically all films older than four or five years are saturated with pathos.”
- http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0814506/bio
- One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. Images of atrocities have become, via the little screens of the television and the computer, something of a commonplace. But are viewers inured -- or incited -- to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of people in faraway zones of conflict?
- Her new book is a profound rethinking of the intersection of "news" art, and understanding in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster. She makes a fresh appraisal of the arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent, foster violence, or create apathy, evoking a long history of the representation of the pain of others -- from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographic documents of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi death camps, and contemporary images from Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.
- This is also a book about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, replete with vivid historical examples and a variety of arguments advanced from some unexpected literary sources. Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Burke, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and Virginia Woolf all figure in this passionate reflection on the modern understanding of violence and atrocity. It includes as well a stinging attack on the provincialism of media pundits who denigrate the reality of war, and a political understanding of conflict, with glib talk about a new, worldwide "society of spectacle:' just as On Photography challenged how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.
http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/ regardingPain.shtml
What is the point of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas?
In her debate with the distinguished lawyer, what conclusion does Woolf come to about the causes of war?
Sontag discusses the uses of war photography. What are some of these uses?
1. “Room of her own” best seller. 1938 TG, concerned about war. Spanish civil war.
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- Woolf is writing during the Spanish Civil War.
Who fought this war?
What were the issues that led to war?
What can we learn from the images of this war?
Tyler Hicks
Report by David Rohde, which read: Near an abandoned Taliban bunker, Northern Alliance soldiers dragged a wounded Taliban soldier out of a ditch today. As the terrified man begged for his life, the Alliance soldiers pulled him to his feet. They searched him and emptied his pockets. Then, one soldier fired two bursts from his rifle into the man’s chest. A second soldier beat the lifeless body with his rifle butt. A third repeatedly smashed a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher into the man’s head.�
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Sontag – page 13
War
Against
War
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Sontag – pp. 14-15
Robert Capa's most famous photo of a Spanish Civil War soldier taken at the instant of his death
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Sontag – pp 32-33
David Seymour (Chim)
Land distribution meeting. Estremadura, Spain, 1936
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Sontag P. 30
Vu magazine, published 18 days after Capa took the photograph. The pages (above) are titled How They Fell (left) and How They Fled.
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Marking the first anniversary of the civil war in Spain, LIFE magazine again used The Falling Soldier in a series of images by Capa. This issue of LIFE is often mistakenly credited as being the first publication where the image appeared. The caption, too, is a little misleading. It reads: "Robert Capa's camera catches a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head in front of Cirdoba.” The assertion that the militiaman had been shot through the head was likely supplied by a LIFE editor who mistook the tassel on the man's cap for a piece of his skull.
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This book cover (above) for Capa and Taro's tribute to the sacrifices made by the Spanish while fighting for their freedom appeared the following year. Ironically, it may have contributed to the theories that Capa had staged the image, simply because it only appeared on the dust jacket and not inside the book itself.
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- According to Sontag, “The suspicion that Capa’s “Death of a Republican Soldier” - titled “The Falling Soldier” in the authoritative compilation of Capa’s work - may not show what it is said to show (one hypothesis is that it records a training exercise near the front line) continues to haunt discussions of war photography. Everyone is a literalist when it comes to photographs.” (p. 46)
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Mathew Brady’s photo of the Confederate dead after the battle of Antietam during the American Civil War. Brady was one of the first photojournalists who captured the horrors the conflict. Antietam, in 1862, was the bloodiest single-day battle in America’s history with about 23,000 casualties.
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Alexander Gardner photographed the dead body of Private Andrew Hoge from the Fourth Virginia Infantry three days after the bloody battle of Gettysburg.
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- Gardner worked for Brady. Sontag claims that the body was moved to a more photographic location. The rifle used as a prop was a common infantryman’s rifle, and not the special rifle used by a sharpshooter (Sontag, pp. 54-55).
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Roger Fenton -
British, Ukraine, 1855
Salt print
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Sontag p0 54- 54
Felice Beato's record of Sikandar Bagh, the place where more than 2000 Indian Sepoys were slaughtered on 16th November 1857 by British troops under the command of Sir Colin Campbell
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Sontag - p. 54
Joseph John Rosenthal - Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima, 1945
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Sontag = p. 56
Robert Doisneau - Le Baiser de l’hotel de Ville, Paris, 1950
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Sontag p 55
EUGENY KHALDEI
Red Flag Over Reichstag, Berlin
1945
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HOLLAND HOUSE, Kensington, London. An interior view of the bombed library at Holland House with readers apparently choosing books regardless of the damage. Photographed in 1940.
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Huynh Cong Ut- best known photo is the Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of Phan Thi Kim Phuc who was photographed as a naked 9-year-old girl running toward the camera to flee a South Vietnamese napalm nattack on the Trang Bang village during the Vietnam War.
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Eddie Adams’s photo of General Nguyen Nguc Loan executing a bound Vietcong prisoner
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Sontag – p. 59
Ron Haviv's photograph of a Serb gunman about to kick a bleeding woman in the head, is one of the most striking images to come out of the Balkans in the last decade of violence.
It was spring 1992 in the small Bosnian town of Bijeljina - and the first mass killings of the Bosnian war were taking place.
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Andy Warhol, Atomic Bomb, 1965. Silk screen on canvas
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