The eighth part of Rick's project on Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is centred around the large format photographs taken in the American civil war. The photographers Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan are mentioned by Sontag though not Mathew Brady. Brady as a photographer-entrepreneur, organized Gardner and Sullivan, who were the core of Brady's Photographic Corps and were the makers of many of the well-known pictures.
In many ways the names are less important than the discursive space. For what we have entered into is what can be called a photographic archive: that repository or collection of nineteenth photographs over time that exists outside of the boundaries and tentacles of the art institution. The art historians mine the archive and reassemble bits and pieces within the modernist categories (genre, landscape, oeuvre, artist, work) that are previously constituted by art and history.
Bits of Timothy O'Sullivan's work has been so reassembled---within the aesthetic as fine art---- whilst his photographs in the achive that functioned as reportage, documentation, evidence, illustration and scientific information has been displaced. His landscapes (in the archive these photographs are called views) now serve to ensure photography's new found autonomy as an art form that can distinquish itself in its essential qualities from all other art forms.
The war photos are left in the archive--that set of practices, institutions, knowledges and and relationships ---to which nineteenth centry photography belonged have escaped the categories of the art museum which make photography a medium of subjectivity. Outside the art museum/gallery we can read the civil war photographs as a part of the American history they were a part of and signified. Reading here involves interpretation, interpreting the photographs that were originally organized into albums shaped as narratives with the help of written texts. Texts like Brady's Photographic Views of the War, plus Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War and Barnard's Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign functioned as contemporary histories, with the photographers working as historians.
The bit of Sontag's text that is montaged to the photos refers to the face: Sontag says:
"With our dead, there has always been a powerful interdiction against showing the naked face. The photographs of Gardner and O’Sullivan still shock because the Union and Confederate soldiers lie on their backs, with the faces of some clearly visible.” (Sontag, p.70)
What we see in some of these photos are not grand history celebrations of heroic actions; but depictions of rotting corpses, shattered trees and rocks, wounded soldiers and they depict the reality of violence, the effects of shells and bullets on flesh and bone. These are not just corposes; the bodies have faces and so are they individual human beings: someone's son, lover, husband or father. Here is a response to the images when they were first shown in New York. And another by Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is photography as historical documents, not painting, that lends a voice to human suffering. Painting was concerned with myth and the theatre of war.
The standard discussion to the sequence of war photographs has been around the truth of what they depicted, given that many of them were staged. But you do not need 'true representation' (as correspondence to reality) as a way to gain an understanding of ethics of these war photos.
The ethics arise from the images creating an aversion in its readers, due to the shock of war being waged on human flesh; an aversion because the readers found some of the images to be so repulsive, that they retreated to the language of martyrdom and redemption to bury the grim images. So we have the struggle of comprehension of what Walt Whitman called "a seething hell and black infernal backgrounds of countless minor scenes" in his Specimen Days.
I have highlighted language, representation, and the metaphysics of presence of these civil war photographs. Despite the textuality of these images/texts we have is the immediacy of the ethical response that conveys a sense of the urgency and complexity of ethical problems and is able to make contact with our own questions about our lives. What these images dramatize in a vivid way is how the images of mutilated human beings in the Iraqi war were not presented in the mass media. They were avoided, censored out. We had to go to find thembecause they were deemed to be too confronting.
We do not read these images as if they are a novel and so look for the ethically salient interactions of character and circumstance; nor do we read their intertextuality for a textually immanent ethic. Nor is the ethical encountered to lie in one's face-to-face encounter with the presence of another person. It is an ethics understood "through language"; an ethics that engages with what philosophers usually call the problem of evil as a way to make sense of the horrors in human history.
What Sontag has done counter the "fancy rhetoric" that downplays the reality of war and pretends that everything has turned into spectacle. She counters it by showing that at the heart of the issues concerning war photography and conscience there are real people, actually suffering.
Yet we should not speak of reality becoming a spectacle as breath-taking provincialism because the 1991 Iraq war was a spectacle on television: the fireworks lighting up the night sky over Baghdad is what we citizens were allowed to see by the US military. It was organized as a spectacle.