The second entry in Rick Visser's project on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others can be found here. The image is Robert Capa's photo of a male Republican soldier being shot on a hilltop during the Spanish Civil War. It is a defining moment of photojournalism that is going through a crisis of identity.

Sontag says that:

“It is a shocking image, and that is the point. Conscripted as part of journalism, images were expected to arrest attention, startle, surprise."

Then----in the 1930s----but not now. It is a memory image of our culture. We have to work at it to read it. We are reading the past and we need to remember what has been forgotten in a consumer culture enwrapped in the dreams of the present.

We re-read Capa's photo as the past from our present situation in Australia and not in terms of some presuppositionless interpretation. We do not slough off the present when we do this, not we read it within an overlay of historical interpretations about war, photography and culture. Someone in Spain, for instance, is going to read this quite differently to someone in Australia. The Spanish civil war is the past and, as the past, it is an otherness. And in making the past familar we are not engaging with the past in itself----that photo---but what others have written and constructed about the past.

In short, we are engaging with Sontag's interpretations of war photos and the way she understands the role of interpretation and cultural criticism in reponding to visual texts. And what is Sontag's interepretation or cultural criticism trrying to do?

This link via the resourceful wood s lot gives us a clue. Catrinona Mills says that Susan Sontag:

'....saves her passion not to attack the voyeuristic misuse of representations of pain but in order to critique the writing of others. She is quite clearly angry at recent French thinkers on media and those theorists who accept their thinking on the �spectacle.� She sums up the argument: �Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real�that is, interesting�to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media (109).'

This refers to Guy Debord's text The Society of the Spectacle A society of the spectacle would be spectacles in the form of the Clinton Sex Scandal, or the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq as shown on CNN: the parading of state power as a form of entertainment that masks socio-political actualities. But the society of the spectacle also refers to the autocratic reign of the consumer market economy and what the French would call globalization as the Americanization of the world. It is a world without historical memory, where the circulation of images flow and merge, like reflections on the water.