Regarding the Pain of Others

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374248583
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
Publisher Description

Regarding the Pain of Others

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141914955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 115

Book Description
Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience. 'Powerful, fascinating. Sontag is our outstanding contemporary writer in the moralist tradition'Sunday Times 'A coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering'The New York Times 'A far-reaching set of ruminations on human suffering, the nature of goodness, the lures, deceptions and truth of images . . . in short, a summary of what it means to be alive and alert in the twentieth century'Independent 'Sontag is on top form: firing devastating questions'Los Angeles Times 'Simple, elegant, fiercely persuasive'Metro One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

On Photography

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography, Artistic
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description

I, etcetera

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853557
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
In eight stories, this singular collection of short fiction written over the course of ten years explores the terrain of modern urban life. In reflective, telegraphic prose, Susan Sontag confronts the reader with exposed workings of an impassioned intellect in narratives seamed with many of the themes of her essays—the nature of knowing, our relationship with the past, and the future in an alienated present.

Believing Is Seeing

Author: Errol Morris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143124250
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Academy Award–winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography In his inimitable style, Errol Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs. With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris shows how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal, and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Each essay in this book is part detective story, part philosophical meditation, presenting readers with a conundrum, and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception, from one of America’s most provocative observers.

The Cruel Radiance

Author: Susie Linfield
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226482510
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
Susie Linfield addresses the issue of whether photographs depicting past scenes of violence & cruelty are voyeuristic, arguing that if we do not look & understand that we are seeing at people, rather than depersonalised acts of inhumanity, our hopes of curbing political violence today are probably limited.

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374100764
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 542

Book Description
This second of three volumes begins in the middle of the 1960s and traces Sontag's evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world to renowned critic.

3 Works

Author: Martha Rosler
Publisher: Halifax, N.S. : Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
ISBN: 9780919616202
Category : Alcohol
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Book Description
"Martha Rosler traces the ways in which art draws its meaning from within its social and political frameworks. The book's two artworks and a related essay exemplify and investigate the social embeddedness of art. They suggest how changing times and changing circumstances affect not only the form and meaning of photography but also its effects on its audience ... The artwork, 'The restoration of high culture in chile' (1977) is a photo and text work that, in fictionalized form, examines the various degrees of political anaesthesia and moral corruption implied by a successful adaptation to unquestioned and abstract notions of high culture ... The photo-and-text work 'The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems' (1974-1975) throws into question the ability of contemporary urban photography to continue the historical potential of social documentary photography. Its accompanying work, 'In, around, and afterthoughts,' written especially for the first edition of 3 works, is a fully developed critical essay in which this question is explored more systematically"--Publisher's website, viewed on March 13, 2015.

Alice in Bed

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466818727
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy which merges the life of Alice James, the brilliant sister of William and Henry James, with the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women; and about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination.