Rick's sixth post on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is another juxtaposition of image and text. This time it links Jacque Callott's suite of eighteen etchings called The Miseries and Misfortunes of War. These depict French soldiers committing atrocities against civilians in the province of Lorraine. This suite of images is juxtaposed with Lorrain Adam's review of Sontag's text.
Adams points out that in Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag reverses her thesis in On Photography. This held that photographic overexposure to atrocity shrivels our sympathy and conscience as readers and interpreters. Her thesis held that a photograph of war horror at first makes war more "real"; but that after a surfeit of such images we grow emotionally numb. In the langauge of Adorno there was no truth in photographic works. By that is meant that they did not challenge the status quo and disclose human aspirations. They are not autonomous art.
It was a popular thesis, if I remember. I recall that I was not convinced by it when I read On Photography. At the time I was running a photographic studio, doing undergraduate studies in philosophy and visual arts, and struggling to understand Clement Greenberg's wriytings on modernism and the avant garde
That was about the time that photography was struggling to be accepted by the conservative high art institutions, and had gone very formalist to establish its modernist creditionals. I got enough from Greenberg to understand that photography had no hope of being a part of the painting avant garde, and so it was kitsch. I sort of understood that this devaluation of photography was part of the long tradition of painters (ie., those with imagination) and their apologists kicking photography because it was produced by a machine and chemicals. Some arts were more art than others and photography was, at best an instrument to document the activities of painters and performance artists. (The latter were the new avant garde).
So I more or less interpreted Sontag's text as part of the high art attack on photography as a popular art; as an anti-photographic text by an aesthete working in the literary institution. I was puzzled by the attack on the visualscape that was then forming around us, and I put it down to modernist distaste for the popular, mass produced art and kitsch. But I did not have the tools to engage with Sontag even though I suspected that photography was in the process of undermining the nature of art. There I left it.
So we come back to the present, where Lorrain Adams points that Sontag has reversed her earlier position and now treats photographic images with more respect. What is she saying according to Adams?
Adams says that Sontag acknowledges that photographs, like any other way of conveying meaning, can be put to many uses and that harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. As the Iraq war indicated, photographs can be taken as evidence to marshal opposition to and action against the atrocities they represented.
Sontag says that we accept these as evidence even though we know that many war photographers were embedded in the military machine during the Iraq war, and we understandd that war photography has had many intended and unintended distortions over the course of its history.
Sontag says, Jacques Callot's 1633 etchings "The Miseries and Misfortunes of War," which represent atrocious suffering endured by a civilian population at the hands of a victorious army on the rampage" are different. These images are like Goya's The Disasters of War, a series of 83 etchings depicting Napoleon's soldiers' slaughter of civilians in Spain in 1808.They are a synthesis of what happened in the past not evidence. As they were made public long after the events they depicted, so they could not be taken as evidence to marshal opposition to and action against the atrocities they represented.
If we accept Malraux's museum without walls plus the network of images in cyberspace, then too much can be made of Sontag's photography (evidence) and painting (synthesis) distinction. Both photographs and etchings are images that interpret the suffering of war; and both require interpretation by readers to understand their meaning. If you like they are historical sources (traces of the past ) that we use with other texts to understand our own history. Photographs are more traces of the past than pristine fact; the traces becomes evidence when they are used in an argument to say that killing civilians is bad.
Sontag seems to imply that war photos as evidence can give us an objective account of the past; that these photos like facts in empricist history speak for themselves. They are unbiased and reveal the truth whereas art creates the truth. Sontag is not alone in this. Kurt over at hmmm: musings from the far east(erwood) mentions the primacy of the image over the text. In a post on moblogging he says that there is something:
"....that bothers me about this primacy of the image, and I think it relates to concepts of truth and authenticity that I like to question from time to time. There seems to be this idea, not just among mobloggers but among society in general, that if a thought or statement or report isn't accompanied by some visual representation, it is somehow less true or valid."
He then mentions, as an example, the photographs that circulated through the media vectors during the Iraq war.
"Take the embedded reporters in Iraq and the coverage from the major TV networks. More often than not, the images that were beamed back from Iraq to accompany the reporters' stories were artifacted, digitized, highly abstract visual accompaniments. They were, for all intents and purposes, worthless in terms of communicating information, of news, or even propaganda. Yet they were shown night after night. Why? Because they symbolized a kind of truth, a visual statement that said "we're in Iraq right now covering this war."
Image is king. There is something in that. I recall ressponding quite strrongly the photographs of suffering children and the video footage of riding with the tanks as they roared across the desert. There was an immediacy there that the words did not capture.
Yet, to be meaningful photos, like facts, needed to be embedded in interpretative discourses. We read both the image and the text; these readings, which are the work of readers/critics, place the image and text in a variety of other interpretations. These interpretations (pro-war anati-war etc) are then contestedas are the images. Criticism, (ie., the work of Sontag,) eases the passage between the image and the reader; it elaborates the images so that they may be more easily understood by readers.