Rating: 
Summary: Suan Sontag feels her own pain
Review: And that's about it. She's a racist with a brilliant mind, and therefore most adept at propoganda. This book, as well as the rest of her work, to some extent and another profoundly reveals this.
Rating:
Summary: Suan Sontag feels her own pain
Review: And that's about it. She's a racist with a brilliant mind, and therefore most adept at propoganda. This book, as well as the rest of her work, to some extent and another profoundly reveals this.
Rating: 
Summary: WELL-WRITTEN, TIMELY & THOUGHT-PROVOKING
Review: I don't know why this book isn't at the top of Amazon's Susan Sontag's list of publications. It was very hard to put it down until I got to the end. It could use another chapter on the type of photos being shown from Iraq (a second edition?) and I'm sure her comments would be very interesting. What I really like about the book is, with the exception of the cover, there are no illustrations to distract us from what she's trying to get across and what she's trying to get across is, as she states, illustrations--sketches, paintings, photos--do not help us, unlike the written word, to UNDERSTAND, not only to feel/observe.
Rating:
Summary: meandering
Review: I found this a difficult book to read.The author uses long meandering sentences frequently enough to distract attention;and her thesis is unclear.The author also tends to make generalising statements,with no evidence to back the statements up.The book does not say anything new;I was disappointed overall.
Rating:
Summary: Ambiguous, Flighty, and Very Difficult to Follow!
Review: I really wanted to like this book, but it was so long-winded and unfocused. I felt that I was being pulled through the dark forest of the author's mind rather than the concrete experience of other people's pain. If she had written this as a journal it would have made more sense-maybe?
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting points, but what is her "argument"?
Review: In my experience, a non-fiction book on history, sociology or politics generally does one of two things. It reports and/or it opines. However, it seemed to me that this little essay, though making a number of interesting observations about war and photography, did neither. Indeed, virtually the whole time, I kept waiting for her ultimate opinion on the issue to come out. By the end, I never saw it. And yet, in the very first sentence of her acknowledgments (and elsewhere therein), she refers to "the argument of this book." Even after reading the laudatory reviews of this book, I couldn't tell what others perceived the "argument" to be either. I am assuming that her "argument" has something to do with the effect that photography has on war. For example if I had to guess (and if it turns out that I am totally off base, it wouldn't shock me), it may be that too many photos of the suffering of others may numb the senses to it and thus should be discouraged. Or maybe, she is making the exact opposite "argument"--that we don't see enough such photos and thus people can't really appreciate how horrible war is. In addition, whatever her argument, is she suggesting that we as a people do something different than what we do now, or is she simply offering neutral observations on the way of the world as it exists now? I have no doubt that others smarter than I could answer all of these questions, but I would have appreciated a little synopsis of her self-described "argument" so I knew what it was.
Rating: 
Summary: The politics of suffering
Review: In this insightful essay, Sontag springboards from an analysis of "Three Guineas" by Virginia Woolf into a discussion about the effects of photography and televised imagery on modern culture and ideas about war and violence. Weaving excerpts from works by Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, Wordsworth, and others, including her own previous work "On Photography", she leads readers on a journey into our own psyches and ways of thinking and viewing the world, and pushes us to examine with conscious knowledge the usage of images. I was especially taken with the idea that it is entirely human to turn away from these pictures of suffering, which are often used as a form of entertainment in the modern world. Sontag rightfully doesn't offer answers or platitudes, but instead indicates a welcoming of our own humanity's foibles as a way to deal with the obligations of conscience and the limits of sympathy.
Rating:
Summary: War in the time of photography
Review: It is photography, beginning with the Civil War, that almost exclusively provides us a window to the suffering of others. Ms. Sontag's essay explores the capacity of the photographic arts to convey such suffering. Throughout, she identifies photographs that have seemed to distill the image of war in a particularly unforgettable way, that is, to imprint elements of suffering, both uniquely associated with a specific war at a specfic point in time and more generally attributable to war. Although she refers to her book's "argument," it seems more precise to maintain that, like the subject of her essay, her aim here is to assess the power and the limits of photography to convey pain to those viewers who enjoy the luxury of being detached from the specific suffering so depicted. Stated differently, her essay itself develops an "image" of the art of photography and its effect on spectators who enjoy various degrees of detachment from images before them. Having been one of the more "provincial" spectators she describes in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others appears to provide an excellent source to discover particularly powerful photographs, at least as commended by Ms. Sontag who has been seriously contemplating the "war image" in all its manifestations for at least two decades. It would have been helpful for the book to have included some of the examples she describes. (This is Art History without the art.) There are times, too, when she seems to forget that suffering is not a stranger in the so-called developed, modern world. The haunting images, captured by photographers on 9/11, of men and women jumping to certain death from the upper floors of the World Trade Center to avoid consumption in the inferno that it had become, will forever retain the sad distinction of being among this century's first "representations" of the continuing horror of suffering in war.
Rating:
Summary: War in the time of photography
Review: It is photography, beginning with the Civil War, that almost exclusively provides us a window to the suffering of others. Ms. Sontag's essay explores the capacity of the photographic arts to convey such suffering. Throughout, she identifies photographs that have seemed to distill the image of war in a particularly unforgettable way, that is, to imprint elements of suffering, both uniquely associated with a specific war at a specfic point in time and more generally attributable to war. Although she refers to her book's "argument," it seems more precise to maintain that, like the subject of her essay, her aim here is to assess the power and the limits of photography to convey pain to those viewers who enjoy the luxury of being detached from the specific suffering so depicted. Stated differently, her essay itself develops an "image" of the art of photography and its effect on spectators who enjoy various degrees of detachment from images before them. Having been one of the more "provincial" spectators she describes in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others appears to provide an excellent source to discover particularly powerful photographs, at least as commended by Ms. Sontag who has been seriously contemplating the "war image" in all its manifestations for at least two decades. It would have been helpful for the book to have included some of the examples she describes. (This is Art History without the art.) There are times, too, when she seems to forget that suffering is not a stranger in the so-called developed, modern world. The haunting images, captured by photographers on 9/11, of men and women jumping to certain death from the upper floors of the World Trade Center to avoid consumption in the inferno that it had become, will forever retain the sad distinction of being among this century's first "representations" of the continuing horror of suffering in war.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting and Though Provoking
Review: Susan Sontag has always been reknown for being able to ask just the right questions, in her thought provoking essays, and she has been even better known as one of the finest writers on photography as an art form, so it is no surprise that both these traits are in evidence in this book. She looks at the moral and ethical issues surrounding the representation of people in severe suffering, or of dead bodies, particularly through the medium of photography. The result is a short book that manages to confront a number of very pressing issues.
Among the topics to brings to the fore is the idea of the media as communicating information. Certainly, a lot of journalists are keen to believe that they have a unique role in bringing events, particularly humanitarian catastophes and wars to the front of the public conciousness, and indeed it is their very efforts that are stirring up public emotion. Sontag examines this assumption closely, as well as its popular criticism - namely that a sensationalistic media have so inundated society with shocking media that we have become all but inured to everyday human tragedy.
She also examines very interesting issues such as the idea of photography as a medium being predicated on real authenticity, and how photos that are "staged" immediately lose a great deal of value in the public conciousness. She examines war photography in a historical context, and finds that many of the war photos before the Vietnam war were staged, including the two most famous victory photos of WWII - that of a Russian raising a flag over the Reichstag and that of American Soldiers raising a giant flag on Iwo Jima.
She further discussing the idea of a photograph having a "universal meaning". Certainly, a photograph of a destroyed city with dead civillians will evoke similar reactions of horror and disgust, but Sontag wryly points out how perpertrators of atrocities are always quick to deny involvement and blame the otherside for the results depicted on film. She cites how Franco insisted that the Basques had used dynamite to blow up Guernica in the Spanish civil war and that no air strikes had taken place which is contrary to what actually happened. So, then perhaps the photographer, can only convey a moment in time, its ideological significance is left for others to determine.
Overall, it is a wonderful book, well worth the effort in reading, covering some important and vital issues. Definitely Sontag, in very fine fettle indeed, which means concise, intelligent and overall, very very wise.
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