Regarding the Pain of Others

“One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them…” (95). This quote explains that pictures should not just inflict a feeling. Photographs should be looked at and thought of as a learning experience. For example, a photograph taken of a Jewish person who has been shot in the head and is falling to the ground. If taken at face value, for most people they would think that is a terrible and what not. While taking Sontag's advice you see more. You see what is really happening, or happened in Germany during the second world war. The photographer had to just stand by as a person was being killed. Is that photographer being immoral while he just stands there watching this atrocity? He may have had a few options, intervene and be killed as well, stand there and watch without taking a picture, or a take a picture, but not just to have a picture of a person being killed. With this picture you can educate others in the world of how life in Germany is for those that are Jewish, and once the war was over the memory of what happened is instilled in the photographs taken during the war.

“The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget” (115). By taking pictures, it obviously shows the things that have happened in the past. By looking at the pictures on blackboard of the napalm, we know humans are capable of making napalm, but they are also capable of actually using this napalm on another country, and not just military. In that particular photograph, it shows children running and screaming with this terrified look in their eyes, which is why the photograph inflicts such emotion. The napalm has already been used, we know the effects, but now when we go to war more people will most likely less willing to jump to the napalm. Not many people in this country want children, no matter what children, to be hurt by our military forces. "Don't forget" in this quote is exactly what photographs do. They make it so we cannot easily forget, and we shouldn't forget. It is part of humanism to be educated about the past, and to learn from not only our mistakes, but our successes and others successes.

“Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems “aesthetic”; that is, too much like art” (76). What I took from this that Sontag believes that photographs are criticized if they are taken of things like war, but they look beautiful like art. In my opinion having an open mind is part of learning and taking in different ways to look at things. Perhaps it may be wrong to take photos of the people who lost their lives in war, but the fact is that photos are taken to educate, to remember, and as an art itself.