I mentioned in an earlier post that Rick from Artrift has a project on Susan Sontag's new book on photography called Regarding the pain of others. That work involves an interpretation of photographic representation of the suffering of others.
I've decided to comment on Rick's project entry by entry on this weblog.
The first entry is here. In it Rick says that there is an interesting connection between the photographic representation of the pain of others and the program of the avant-garde in its effort to shock. He then gives us a quote from Peter Burger's book Theory of the Avant Garde about Dada, shock and provocation.
Burger argues that the avant-garde challenges the Modernist assumption of the autonomous status of art and celebration of the distinction of art from bourgeois society. The avant-garde does this by challenging the institution of art itself, the conventional means and modes of the contextualization, and the reception of art in society.
War photos do provoke. Many of them are designed to do so, eg., Mathew Brady's matter of act photos of dead bodies lying on the ground to show the horrors of the American civil war. He shocked America by displaying his photographs of battlefield corpses from Antietam and so tore away the romance of war. He was able to do so because it was assumed by his audience that photography, unlike art, mirrored the real.
I have two quibbles with Rick's suggestive montage of the Sontag book and the avant garde.
War photos do take us beyond the avant garde's challenge to modernism. The avant garde aimed to shock, but they also wanted to return art to everyday life. War photos are a part of everyday life; integrated into our social practices. War photos are then selectively picked up by the art musem and turned into art.
My second quibble. War photos touch the core of our humanity in a way that the Dadists never did. We do not respond as if viewing an art object. We respond to the child runninng down the road burning from napalm as human beings. We do not see this as art. It is the horror that shocks us.
These quibbles do not undermine Rick's montage. With these differences in mind we can think about the shock good war photography has on us. This shock is a long way from the images produced by the embedded Fox Television journalists that glamourised and so romanced the Iraqi war.
But do war photographs shock us now? Or has the effect worn off?
(life intervenes)
Gary - Thanks for your comments on Sontag and Burger. I was hoping in bringing these two together in the same space, to line up two parallel fields of shock, allowing them play off each other, not to conflate them or to regard them as being identical. Burger's comments on shock, the instability and, perhaps, ineffectiveness of shock, have something to say about war photos as well. In fact, all the dynamics of shock Burger touches on, have some connection to war photos as well. You are right to point out differences as I had only suggested resonances.
Posted by: Rick Visser on July 3, 2003 12:40 PMRick,
You are quite right. I should have emphasised the play between the similarities and resonances. I had accepted what you had done without spelling it out.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on July 4, 2003 10:11 AM