Summary Of Regarding The Pain Of Others By Sontag

When the suffering of others is commercialized by photography

Over the long history of art and the past few decades of photography, the use of pain in image making has been significantly prevalent. Dead and suffering bodies and devastated landscapes have been a trendy part of contemporary art projects and the art market. Beyond the art production, the pictures of the sufferers of natural disasters, hunger and starvation, chronic and pandemic diseases, genocide and massacre, civilian fatalities in wartime, forced migration, street and domestic violence, trauma and torture, murder and suicide, poverty and deprivation, and many kinds of excruciating events are presenting and representing everyday by worldwide media. Apart from the role of the

72). She also highlights the fact that those who have not experienced such horrific conditions cannot understand and imagine the reality that lies in such painful images.

Although in this book, Sontag uses both “pain” and “suffering” to shed light on the matter which was discussed, and both of words are often inter-related, it seems that “suffering” is more meaningful in the context of the inquiry. Because there is a feature for “pain” in terms of physiological bodily placed sensation and being objective, while “suffering” has a more subjective, social and collective characteristic going beyond the body (Wilkinson, 2005, pp. 21–2) and affecting construction of the attachment of the individual to the world (Bueno-Gómez, 2017, p.

According to the general perception of public towards portraying the “suffering” of people in miserable conditions, it could be understood that there is “hierarchy” between what could be seen in the images in relation to the source of pain. This means that there is superior and inferior suffering which has different levels of social dignity, as well as photogenic and non-photogenic suffering. As a case in point, Sontag writes that “war was and still is the most irresistible and picturesque news” (2004, p. 43). In comparison with poverty, war scenes are more photogenic, while the poverty is a trivial matter which could be seen almost everywhere across the globe. The war is a kind of infrequent phenomenon assumed to have a start and end date, therefore, everyone does not have the opportunity and ability to go to the battleground, jeopardizing him/herself as a war photographer in a perilous condition. As a result, from the point of view of the audience, a war photographer is more prestigious than a photographer who merely takes picture of the poor and the vulnerable