{"product_id":"regarding-the-pain-of-others","title":"Regarding the Pain of Others","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFirst published in 2003, Susan Sontag’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRegarding the Pain of Others\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e examines the troubling power of photographs to shape our understanding of war, suffering and the lives of strangers. Moving from the Spanish Civil War to the conflicts of the twentieth century and beyond, Sontag asks what it means to look at images of violence, and whether witnessing another person’s pain can lead to genuine understanding or merely satisfy our appetite for the terrible. Drawing on the work of photographers, writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf and Francisco Goya, she questions the assumption that images speak for themselves, exposing the ways in which photographs can be manipulated, misunderstood or stripped of their historical context. Her inquiry is as much moral as aesthetic, confronting the uneasy distance between the spectator and the suffering subject.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWritten nearly three decades after \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOn Photography\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, this incisive essay revisits and complicates Sontag’s earlier thinking about images and their influence on modern consciousness. She considers the limits of sympathy, the politics of representation and the possibility that repeated exposure to atrocity might dull rather than deepen our response to it, while resisting any easy conclusions about what photographs can make us feel or understand. Published in the aftermath of the wars in the Balkans and at the beginning of a new century of televised conflict, the book remains strikingly relevant in an age of continuous digital imagery. It is a searching meditation on the responsibilities of looking, and one of Sontag’s most enduring contributions to the ethics of art and public life.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom the book\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e— Susan Sontag, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRegarding the Pain of Others\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOn \u003cem\u003eRegarding the Pain of Others\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Wise and somber. . .Sontag’s closing words acknowledge that there are realities which no picture can convey.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e— Los Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardner's EU","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":64009324593482,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/thelamppostparis.com\/products\/regarding-the-pain-of-others","provider":"The Lamp-Post Library \u0026 Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}