Regarding the pain of others susan sontag pdf

Admiration is mixed with disapproval of the pictures for the pain they might give the female relatives of the dead. Yet the Times reporter cannot resist the melodrama that mere words supply the "dripping bodies" ready for "the gaping trenches" , while reprehending the intolerable realism of the image.

Or the images may be too terrible, and need to be suppressed in the name of propriety or of patriotism-like the images showing, without appropriate partial concealment, our dead. To display the dead, after all, is what the enemy does. Taken by an unknown Boer photographer ten days after the British defeat, which had cost the lives of thirteen hundred of their soldiers, it gives an intrusive view down a long shallow trench packed with unburied bodies. What is particularly aggressive about the image is the absence of a landscape.

Censorship of the press by the British General Staff was less inflexible. During the Vietnam era, war photography became, normatively, a criticism of war. It proved harder for the American authorities to duplicate the Thatcher controls on the reporting of their own foreign adventures.

The terms for allowing the use of cameras at the front for nonmilitary purposes have become much stricter as war has become an activity prosecuted with increasingly exact optical devices for tracking the enemy. Central Command in Tampa, Florida. Often their decisions are cast as judgments about "good taste"-always a repressive standard when invoked by institutions. Tabloids are usually bolder than broadsheet papers in printing grisly images; a picture of a severed hand lying in the rubble of the World Trade Center ran in one late edition of New York's Daily News shortly after the attack; it seems not to have appeared in any other paper.

The other argument often used to suppress pictures cites the rights of relatives. It is easier to think of the enemy as just a savage who kills, then holds up the head of his prey for all to see. The photographs taken by Gardner and O'Sullivan still shock because the Union and Confederate soldiers lie on their backs, with the faces of some clearly visible. Though "Dead G Is on Buna Beach" is invariably described as showing three soldiers lying face down in the wet sand, one of the three lies on his back, but the angle from which the picture was taken conceals his head.

This is a dignity not thought necessary to accord to others. The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying. More recently, the photographs are of whole families of indigent villagers dying of AIDS. These sights carry a double message. They confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward-that is, poor-parts of the world.

As of today we have 78,, eBooks for you to download for free. No annoying ads, no download limits, enjoy it and don't forget to bookmark and share the love! The first edition of the novel was published in January 7th , and was written by Susan Sontag.

The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is available in Paperback format. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, Regarding the Pain of Others pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:.

In America by Susan Sontag. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, by Susan Sontag.