Although I feel there are relatively few occasions on which we should “look to Susan Sontag for advice“, Lorena O’Neil’s short piece When Suffering And Photography Collide on Ozy – short of Ozymandias.
In case you’ve forgotten, the inscription:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
from the plinth of a statue for a long-dead Egyptian tyrant was the inspiration for one of Shelley’s best-known works, a 15 minute sonnet penned in a poetry speed-writing contes that produced certainly one of his best-known works. Great and all-powerful Osymandias may have been, but all that remained was the shattered ruins of this boastful great work, “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” and “near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage” alone in an empty desert. Or possibly in fact rather less than this.
I’m not any wiser as to why a web site which seems to think of itself as a kind of cultural trendsetter, bringing you “the new and the next“, putting you ahead of the stream, giving you in on the “new people, places, trends, ideas and opinions months before you’re going to hear about it in the mainstream press.” Perhaps the name just means they are huge braggarts too?
Of course I’m not one of the “Change generation” and so perhaps shouldn’t be reading the site. But enough mocking the meaningless. O’Neil’s piece starts off with a question:
As cell phone cameras proliferate, so do multiple images of violence from around the globe – but is it morally corrupt to look at these pictures and videos?
A good question (though I’m not sure about that ‘morally corrupt’.) But perhaps she passes over to Sontag and her book, Regarding the Pain of Others (which I’ve not read) a little too quickly. I’d want to start by asking why people are recording the kind of videos and take the kind of photographs she is talking about, and perhaps not want to treat them as a homogeneous group. And then to go on to ask why we should want to look at them (and I think generally we should, at least for those made with a serious purpose, though I know we don’t always do so for the best of reasons.)
But where I have a problem is with the Sontag’s conclusion “”If we could do something about what the images show, we might not care as much about these issues,” because now there is almost always something we can do, even if it may not be a huge contribution. We can make others aware, sign petitions, donate money, lobby our representatives, write letters, tweet, post on Facebook, join organisations, write articles, protest…
O’Neil writes:
“Sontag wants us to engage in a thoughtful debate, be it with others or just ourselves, about pain and violence and war, and our inability to understand something we have not experienced.”
Thoughtful debate seems a good starting point, but unless thought leads to action it is empty.
Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ (which is recommended reading at the bottom of the article) is perhaps one of the most infuriating books on photography I’ve ever read, full of insights mixed with half truths and misunderstandings. My copy ended up with more underlining and marginal scribbles than any other work I’ve ever read, and my notes on some chapters became longer than her contribution and ended up in little magazines. But my review was rather short:
‘Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ is great television.’
A related article you may also like to read, published last December on The Weeklings is On the Blindness of “WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY” by Chloe Pantazi, which discusses Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition, WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, which ended in February.
