Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag 

• images of the atrocious can : steel oneself against weakness(make self strong), desensitise self, or to acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible (the cinurable, the hopeless the chronic)

• what do we do with such knowledge as photographs that bring such faraway suffering? how should we respond? what emotions would be desirable? sympathy or suspicion? 

• Is sympathy a valid response? - Spectator (if we are looking at these images sympathetically it suggests we have a link with tht image which is untrue.) Impotence (if we look at something sympathetically, it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that we can’t do much about it). Innocence (if we look at a picture sympathetically, we feel we are not accomplices to what has caused that suffering.) - these are all issues.

• for those reasons, sympathy is not an appropriate response to these images.

• Is suspicion a valid response? - We live in a “society of spectacle.” Every event has to be turned into a media event and has to have images and phrases etc for it to be real. People aspire to become images (aka celebrities). Reality has abdicated, there are only representations. 

• War is mediatique - it’s won or lost depending on what’s shown in the media. 

• Suspicion as a valid response? - Cynically (oversaturation has caused us to not care)(we know the image is selected or edited to display a certain narrative.)(of their actual intentions and purpose.) 

• Baudelaire quote - newspapers are just filled with horrors. all used to scare people. 

• Ecology of images (sontag’s book). A cutting back on the amount of images that we use in order to protect the images that we use and the reality they depict. however she admits there is never going to be an ecology of images. no mass media is going to ration horror to keep fresh its ability to shock. ( however there is censorship in social media. word limits, reporting etc, who decides???).  What are social media’s policy on images? Hatespeech is an interesting idea. 

• People who work as war photographers etc - there has to be rules that have to be followed. what are these? 

• Sontag now says this ecology of images idea is conservative because it assumes that everyone is the same and our response is the same (aimed at western reader/viewer). who has the right to select and censor the use of images? how can you compare suffering? 

• is the fact that we need these images vulgar/low? how neutral are the victims in this representation of their own suffering - things could be acted out?

go through images - what is the purpose of the image? what is the image being used for? how do the images change according to the context in which they are seen?