1.  What is your main takeaway from Sontag’s essay?

Sontag’s book, Regarding the Pain of Others, deals with the way people react to other people’s suffering, especially in war. People seem to be drawn to images that depict suffering brought on, not by accidents, but by humans inflicting pain on other humans. She also discusses the inherent problem with photographs from war and other catastrophes. She addresses several ways in which photographs mislead people, whether intentionally as those of photographers hired by governments to project positive image of a war, or by the way people interpret the photo due to their removal from the events in the image.

2.  Give at least two smaller takeaways from the essay.  Things that you found 

to be of particular interest.  This can include things that surprised you or provoked 

some thoughts.

One thing I found interesting was Sontag’s discussion about how photographs do not always give an accurate picture of events. Until Photoshop came on the scene, people believed that photographs captured reality. That was confirmed by the fact that they could be submitted to court as evidence. The pictures of concentration camps taken at the end of World War II that featured piles of dead bodies, were taken to show the reality of these camps. But as Sontag points out, the pictures only captured what happened right before the photographs were taken. The camps were, in reality, well-run machines during the war. The inmates were killed by gas and cremated immediately. The scene in the pictures was the result of actions taken as the allied forces were approaching. This makes you wonder about other photographs that are taken during wars. Are we intentionally being given false information? Or is it just a matter of mistaken reporting.

Another point that Sontag makes is that “the frankest representations of war, and of disaster-injured bodies, are of those who seem most foreign, therefore least likely to be known.” When the viewers might recognize someone, the pictures are more discreet. It is okay to expose a person’s dismembered body as long as the viewers can’t put a name with it. We are more indifferent to the suffering of others when we are far removed from them.

3.  Upload an image of pain/suffering to your blog and discuss it.  You can be 

straightforward about this, or you can take a well-known image that you may 

look at differently after reading Sontag.  

“Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan.”

President Bashar al-Assad has been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his people, including women, children and babies, in Syria’s civil war. We read this and heard about it on the news, but the US government did not believe we should get involved. The White House said that it would be “silly” to go after Assad, and Secretary of State Tillerson, stated that Mr. Assad’s fate “will be decided by the Syrian people.” However, a few days later, in response to seeing images of people being gassed, an attack in which Assad is being blamed for the death of 72 people, the administration took a one hundred eighty degree turn and came out against Assad and bombed Syria. The images in the media had the power to quickly “crystallize sentiment” in the administration in a way that words did not.