__ ______________________________________

. " f Tics," he uses humor in combination other

case with A 0 effects _ for example, as contrast or relief. List
elements, to this essay In what context do they appear?
five funny momen s m 'th their What do you think Sedans
How do they mteract WI .)
. to do with humor in each of these IDstances.
was trymg .'h h
. d . is concerned as much, If not more, wIt w at
3. f as with what he thinks of them. Compare
others thm 0 h' 'dentity depends on how others see
Sedaris' of the Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just
f
him to Judith OrtlJ I(p 91) How do the issues with which
Met a Girl Named react to how they are perceived,
they are concerne ,an
compare? .
" , . k about it " Sedaris tells himself when he IS young. he
4. Don t thm , h's compulsions - as he says, There
is unable not to obsess I ewhere but I was damned if I could
must have been an flff SWltc som ts in ;our life when you have been
find it" (par. 14).:,ek _ something that happened
unable to not m a. thin
a
ou are looking forward to
to you, somethmg you dId, d had an off switch) What
or fearful of. When have you wlf :re not able to simply tum their
do you think it means that peop e
minds off?
SUSAN SONTAG
Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was an intellectual who ranged widely,
writing about subjects including photography, the AIDS epidemic, and
[iteralY theory. She was also a novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Her
nonfiction books include Against Interpretation (1966), On Photog
raphy (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and Regarding the Pain
of Others (2003); her novels include The Volcano Lover (1992) and
In America (2000). "Regarding the Pain of Others, " drawn from the
book of the same title, demonstrates two of Sontag's greatest interests,
aesthetics and politics, as much ofher work has done - whether she is
studying the impact of photographs of atrocity or the impact of lan
guage on the way we think about disease, Sontag's work is concerned
with the way representation informs the way people think about the
world. Keep an eye out as you read for the ways in which Sontag brings
these two interests together here.
Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph.
Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the
normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed
by a photograph that is not flattering.) Beautifying is one classic
operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral
People a
response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its
Worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active
response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter con
duct, they must shock.
An example: A few years ago, the public health authorities in
Canada, where it had been estimated that smoking kills 45,000
year, decided to supplement the warning printed on
i
ery
pack of cigarettes with a shock photograph - of cancerous
llngS, or a stroke-clotted brain, or a damaged heart, or a bloody
1ll0Uth in acute periodontal distress. A pack with such a pic-
accompanying the warning about the deleterious effects of
would be 60 times more likely to inspire smokers to quit,
373
374 SUSAN SONTAG
a research study had somehow calculated, than a pack with only
the verbal warning.
Let's assume this is true. Still one might wonder, for how long?
Does shock have term limits? Right now the smokers of Canada
are recoiling in disgust, if they do look at these pictures. Will those
smoking five years from now still be upset? Shock can become
familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn't, one can not look.
People have means to defend themselves against what is upset
ting - in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing
to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As
one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become
habituated to the horror of certain images.
Yet there are cases where repeated exposure to what shocks,
saddens, appalls does not use up a full-hearted response. Habitu
ation is not automatic, for images (portable, insertable) obey
different rules than real life. Representations of the Crucifixion
do not become banal to believers, if they really are believers. This
is even more true of staged representations. Performances of
Chushingura, probably the best-known narrative in all of Japa
nese culture, can be counted on to make a Japanese audience sob
when Lord Asano admires the beauty of the cherry blossoms on
his way to where he must commit seppuku - sob each time, no
matter how often they have followed the story (as a Kabuki or
Bunraku play, as a film); the ta'ziyah drama of the betrayal
murder of Imam Hussayn does not cease to bring an Iranian audI
ence to tears no matter how many times they have seen the mar
tyrdom enacted. On the contrary. They weep, in part, because
they have seen it many times. People want to weep. Pathos, in the
form of a narrative, does not wear out. ,
But do people want to be horrified? Probably not. Still, there .
are pictures whose power does not abate, in part because
cannot look at them often. Pictures of the ruin of faces that WI f
always testify to a great iniquity survived, at a cost: the faces
horribly disfigured First World War veterans who survived t e
. d W sea
r
inferno of the .trenches; the melted thlckene WI cd 00
tissue of survlvors of the Amencan atomlC bombs dropp
?
e is,
of
and Nagasaki ; t?e faces cleft by machete
Tutsi survlvors of the genocldal rampage launched by th
in Rwanda - is it correct to say that people get used to these: ted
. f . f .. ass
oC13
Indeed, the very notlOn 0 atrOCIty, 0 war cnme, IS
with the expectation of photographic evidence. Such evidenc
REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS 375
usually, of something posthumous: the remains, as it were - the
mounds of skulls in Pol Pot's Cambodia, the mass graves in Guate
mala and El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. And this posthumous
reality is often the keenest of summations. As Hannah Arendt
pointed out soon after the end of the Second World War, all the
photographs and newsreels of the concentration camps are mis
leading because they show the camps at the moment the Allied
troOps marched in. What makes the images unbearable - the
piles of corpses, the skeletal survivors - was not at all typical for
the camps, which, when they were functioning, exterminated their
inmates systematically (by gas, not starvation and illness) , then
immediately cremated them. And photographs echo photographs:
It was inevitable that the photographs of emaciated Bosnian pris
oners at Omarska, the Serb death camp created in northern Bos
nia in 1992, would recall memories of the photographs taken in
the Nazi death camps in 1945.
Photographs of atrocity illustrate as well as corroborate. By
passing disputes about exactly how many were killed (numbers
are often inflated at first ), the photograph gives the indelible
sample. The illustrative function of photographs leaves opinions,
prejudices, fantasies , misinformation untouched. The informa
tion that many fewer Palestinians died in the assault on Jenin
than had been claimed by Palestinian officials (as the Israelis had
said all along) made much less impact than the pictures of the
razed center of the refugee camp. And, of course, atrocities that
are not secured in our minds by well-known photographic im
ages, or of which we simply have had very few images - the total
extermination of the Herero people in Namibia decreed by the
?erman colonial administration in 1904; the Japanese onslaught
In China, notably the massacre of nearly 400,000 and the rape
of 80,000 Chinese in December 1937, the so-called Rape of Nan
king; the rape of some 130,000 women and girls (10,000 of whom
Committed suicide) by victorious Soviet soldiers unleashed by
commanding officers in Berlin in 1945 - seem more remote.
hese are memories that few have cared to claim.
The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the
Present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of ref
and serve as totems of causes: Sentiment is more likely
: crystalize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan.
Ill
nd
photographs help construct - and revise - our sense of a
Ore distant past, with the posthumous shocks engineered by the
376 SUSAN SONTAG
REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS 377

circuJation of hitherto unknown photographs. Photographs that
everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society
chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think
about. It calls these ideas "memories," and that is, over the long
run, a fiction. StrictJy speaking, there is no such thing as collec_
tive memory - part of the same family of spurious notions as
collective guilt. But there is collective instruction.
Al! memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each
person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering
but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story of
how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in Our
minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, rep
resentative images, which encapsulate common ideas of signifi
cance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings. Poster-ready
photographs - the mushroom cloud of an A-bomb test, Martin
Luther King, Jr., speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washing
ton, D.C., the astronaut on the moon - are the visual equivalent
of sound bites. They commemorate, in no less blunt fashion than
postage stamps, Important Historical Moments; indeed, the tri
umphalist ones (the picture of the A-bomb excepted) become
postage stamps. Fortunately, there is no one signature picture of
the Nazi death camps.
As art has been redefined during a century of modernism as 10
whatever is destined to be enshrined in some kind of museum, so
it is now the destiny of many photographic troves to be exhibited
and preserved in museum-like institutions. Among such archives
of horror, the photographs of genocide have undergone the
est institutional development. The point of creating public repOSI
tories for these and other relics is to ensure that the crimes
depict will continue to figure in people's consciousness. This IS
called remembering, but in fact it is a good deal more than that.
The memory museum in its current proliferation is a product
of a way of thinking about, and mourning, the destruction of
pean Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, which came to
fruition in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Mem
OI
' J1
. Bel'l J .
Museum in Washington, D.C. , and the Jewish Museum JI1 J1'
Photographs and other memorabilia of the Shoah have been
of
,
mitted to a perpetual recirculation, to ensure that. what they
will be remembered. Photographs of the sufferIng and rD
f
f iILlr
e
dom of a people are more than reminders of death, 0 a
victimization. They invoke the miracle of sun/ivaI. To aim at the
perpetuation of memories means, inevitably, that one has under
taken the task of continually renewing, of creating, memories _
aided, above all, by the impress of iconic photographs. People
want to be able to visit - and refresh - their memories. Now
rDany victim peoples want a memory museum, a temple that
houses a comprehensive, chronologically organized, illustrated
narrative of their sufferings. Annenians, for example, have long
been clamoring for a museum in Washington to institutionalize
the memory of the genocide of Armenian people by the Ottoman
Turks. But why is there not already, in the nation's capital, which
happens to be a City whose population is overwhelmingly African
American, a Museum of the History of Slavery? Indeed, there is
no Museum of the History of Slavery - the whole story, starting
with the slave trade in Africa itself, not just selected parts, such
a the Underground Railroad - anywhere in the United States.
This, it seems, is a memory judged too dangerous to social stabil
ity to activate and to create. The Holocaust Memorial Museum
and the future Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial are
about events that didn't happen in America, so the memory-work
doesn't risk rousing an embittered domestic population against
authority. To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was
African slavery in the United States of America would be to
acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture
the evil that was there, and from which the United States - a
unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders through
out its entire history - is exempt. That this country, like every
?ther country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the found
109, and still all-powerful, belief in American exceptionalism. The
?ational consensus on American history as a history of progress
IS a new setting for distressing photographs - one that focuses
OUr attention on wrongs, both here and elsewhere, for which
A.rnerica sees itself as the solu tion or cure.
For Discussion and Writing
1. :-Vhat does Sontag say photographs have to be able to do to have an
2 11l1pact on people's consciences and behavior?
. While "Regarding the Pain of Others" has certain analytic points to
hake about the way photographs of atrocity work on viewers, it is
ard to say from this excerpt that she is arguing one central point;
______________________ ___ ________ _______
even the title's first word points to an exploration than an argu_
ment. However, she does make a number of cl.alms. How does she
th
m) What kind of evidence does she use to support them?
rna
k
e e . l' )
And how does she connect these different calms.
connections Though William F. Buckley Jr. (in "Why Don't We Com_
3. 1')" 76) and Sontaa are writing about very different kmds of
pam., p. d f . ) b th b
phenomena (and are very different kin s 0 wnters, 0 con
cerned with the reasons people are and are. not roused actlOn by
events. Compare the way they think and wnte about
Why do people act or not act in each of these essays. Why. What
might the nature of these authors' concerns say about.
4. Sontag writes of the power of narrative (part' 4),
but then, after offering a short but power 1st 0 wen Ie -cen ury
atrocities (par. 7), Sontag claims that photographs. are more powerfuII
8) In eff
ect Sontag's own narrative 0 f atrocities f0
han word ( .. . k . t spar.
lows her first claim but contradicts her second. Do you thm st?nes,
I nd nonfictional can attest just as powerfully to atroCity as
fictlona a , h' k f I )
photographs can? Why or why not? Can you t m 0 any examp es.
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON
Declaration of Sentiments
and Resolutions
Born in 1815 in Johnstown, New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a
leader of the American women 5 rights movement of the mid- and late
nineteenth century. An organizer of the Seneca Falls, New York, con
vention in 1848, she was active in trying to obtain for women the right
to vote, to divorce, and to be equal to men under the law. Active also in
abolition, Stanton lectured widely on womens suffrage and edited a
weekly newspaper focusing on women's rights issues.
The "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions" was produced at
Seneca Falls by Stanton and others. When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote
her own womens rights document in 1792, she alluded to the "Vindi
cation of the Rights of Man," a defense of the French Revolution, by
calling it "Vindication of the Rights of Woman. " As you read the Seneca
Falls declaration, think about its parallels to the American Declaration
of Independence (p. 187) and think about why Stanton decided not to
USe the word independence in the document.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for
One portion of the family of man to assume among the people of
the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto
.oCcupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God
tle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires
they should declare the causes that impel them to such a
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and
PUrsuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments
instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
Whenever any form of government becomes destruc
of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to
379