“It seems the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked” (Sontag 41).
- Q:”Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it– say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken– or those who could learn from it” (Sontag 42).
- C: I strongly disagree with this idea. In the name of realism, as Sontag later states, there is a need to show “horrors of war”. There should not be any sort of special category for those who can and cannot handle the imagery. I find a need for depicting imagery in the name of historical reasoning, we need to understand what has happened in the past in order to not repeat it. I do agree that surgeons and medical professionals can examine it for additional reasoning, but I think there is a standard that everyone should be exposed to.
- Q: What imagery is considered “okay” to show, what imagery is not?
“The expressive phrases in script below each image comment on the provocation. While the image, like every image, is an invitation to look, the caption, more often than not, insists on the difficulty of doing just that” (Sontag 45).
“A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what?”(Sontag 47).
- Q:”If governments had their way, war photography, like most war poetry, would drum up support for the soldiers’ sacrifice” (Sontag 48).
- C: I found this quote to be very propagative in thought against the military, but I agree with the statement. They want the support of citizens, look an an example like the Vietnam antiwar protestors, black lives matter protesters, etc. the government doesn’t like imagery or language against them; especially in America. I can understand certainly as to why war photography did not initially depict “horrors” of war. Many photographers were probably intimidated by government influence of creativity, and the said rise of “faking” and staging photographs. If you refer to Chapter 4, Sontag describes many examples of staged American historical photographs. In this quote though, there is some depiction of individuals rebelling against government influence, chasing down images that shared both sides of war. This short novel is able to cover multiple perspectives of war imagery and photography, it is up to the individual where they pull influence, inspiration, and meaning from.
- Q: How does the government both influence and restrict our creative freedom; despite the first amendment rights to free speech? (see quote below also as ideas)
“Under instructions from the War Office not to photograph the dead, the maimed, or the ill, and precluded from photographing most other subjects by the cumbersome technology of picture-taking, Fenton went about rendering the war as a dignified all-male group outing” (Sontag 49-50).
“In the name of realism, one was permitted–required–to show unpleasant, hard facts. Such pictures also convey “a useful moral” by showing “the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry” (Sontag 52).
“No sophisticated sense of what photograph is or can be will ever weaken the satisfaction of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer” (Sontag 55).
