Assignment: read the following quotes, then write a response that explains some of the ideas that Sontag is trying to get at in Regarding the Pain of Others. Use any of the quotes below as well as other examples from the text that help to explain the ideas presented. (Remember that it's helpful to go to the pages from which the quotes are taken to read them in their full context; they'll make more sense that way too.)
Ch 5
“That a gory battlescape could be beautiful—in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of war made my artists. The idea does not sit well when applied to images taken by cameras: to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins…Photographs tend to transform, whatever their subject; and as am image something may be beautiful—or terrifying, or unbearable, or quite bearable—as it is not in real life” (76).
“Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems “aesthetic”; that is, too much like art” (76).
Ch 6
“One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them…” (95).
“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated” (101).
Ch 8
“To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others” (114)
“The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget” (115).
“Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking” (115).
