"'The pictures will not go away': Susan Sontag's lifelong obsession with suffering"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...nd-photography
The great critic shaped our understanding of the camera’s position in culture, which she continued to sharpen in her last days following the Iraq war
Benjamin Moser, Tue 17 Sep 2019 03.00 EDT
In 2004, as Susan Sontag lay dying, horrifying pictures began to emerge from a prison in Iraq.
She had received a diagnosis of blood cancer at the end of March that year, at the age of 71. Having had cancer twice before, she knew the suffering the disease, treated or untreated, would entail. And as she hesitated over what course to take, she, like much of the world, was looking at the pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib. This had been one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious prisons, and was now in US hands. The pictures showed soldiers torturing Iraqis: chaining them to walls; forcing them to stand in painful and humiliating positions; piling them, naked, into human pyramids.
You could tell the Americans were having fun. The images they created had not been kept secret. They had been sent to friends, posted to Facebook, taken and spread with a new gadget: a mobile telephone that incorporated a camera. This technology had been gaining users since the beginning of the decade. But if the tools were new, the questions the images raised, about which representations were appropriate and which were obscene, went back at least to the Greeks.
a hooded and wired Iraqi prisoner in the Abu Ghraib prison.
‘There is aggression implicit in every use of the camera’ … a hooded and wired Iraqi prisoner in the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. Photograph: AP
They also went back to the beginning of Sontag’s own life. When she was 12, in a bookstore in California, she came across pictures of the Holocaust. The moment, she said, split her life in two. From then on, in book after book, she tried to understand how images, especially images of suffering and war, reflected reality – and how they falsified or commodified it. Was it appropriate to take pictures of other people’s suffering? And when such images appeared, was it more grotesque to look –or to look away?
And so Sontag went to work on what became her final published essay, Regarding the Torture of Others. Throughout her career, she had shown the dangers of separating things from their proper names. Aristotle wrote that metaphor “consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else”. If that sounded abstract, Sontag would show how the abuse of language could break people’s bodies. Among metaphor’s sinister powers was its ability to twist language in the service of evil causes.
The Iraq war began with bad metaphors. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Condoleezza Rice, then President George W Bush’s national security adviser. In England, the “dodgy dossier” showing that Iraq was hiding prohibited weapons was, in the words of a British official, “sexed up”. The lead-up to the war began in September 2002. Why then? Well, Bush’s chief of staff explained, “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August”.
When the results of these words became evident – estimates suggest between 465,000 and 1.2 million Iraqis died – those responsible tried to separate the reality from its representation. The president claimed to be shocked and disgusted by the photographs, Sontag wrote, “as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict”. Legalese replaced clear words: “There was also the avoidance of the word ‘torture,’” she noted.
Those held in the extra-legal US penal empire had become “detainees”; the newly obsolete word “prisoners” might suggest that they had the rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilised countries. This endless “global war on terrorism” – into which both the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by Pentagon decree – inevitably leads to the demonising and dehumanising of anyone declared by the Bush administration to be a terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.
Into these fraught meanings entered the camera. Years before, in her great collection On Photography, Sontag had called it a “predatory weapon” and said that “there is aggression implicit in every use of the camera”. Now, she saw the Abu Ghraib pictures being made by people who recorded torture exactly as they recorded everything else.
“Andy Warhol’s ideal of filming real events in real time – life isn’t edited, why should its record be edited? – has become a norm,” she wrote. “Here I am – waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school.” The camera made all events equal: “The distinction between photograph and reality – as between spin and policy – can easily evaporate.” As Warhol had predicted, it made people equal to their metaphors. “The photographs are us,” she wrote.
She admitted that there would be no “ecology of images” as she had once hoped, no way to check their proliferation. And so the image had to be made a positive weapon. Pictures had to be wielded against other pictures, as artists since Goya had endeavoured to do.
“The pictures will not go away,” she wrote. “That is the nature of the digital world in which we live … Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and so much easier to forget.”
Soon after the essay was published, Sontag elected to have a bone marrow transplant. “Torture is not too strong a word,” a friend of hers said. But her own bouts with the camera were not over. As she underwent the terrible treatment, her partner, Annie Leibovitz, was taking pictures of her: bloated, writhing, and then, finally, dead. When these pictures were published, after Sontag’s death, they ignited a fierce debate. The questions – about the ethics of photography, about how to regard the pain of others – were a homage to Sontag’s final thoughts.
Discuss,
Bernice
