Sontag, Devant la douleur des autres.
Translated from the English by Fabienne Durand-Bogaert.
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- Condition : very good, clean, minimal signs of wear.
One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it dispenses with countless opportunities to consider (from a distance, through the medium of the camera) the horrors that occur in all parts of the world. Images of atrocities have become, through the medium of the television or computer screen, a kind of commonplace. But does the depiction of cruelty make viewers immune to violence or does it incite them to it? Is their perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of images? What does it mean to be concerned about the suffering of people in distant conflict zones? Twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag's now classic essay On Photography set the terms of the debate. This book seeks to reconsider in depth the interplay between 'news', art and the way we understand contemporary depictions of war and disaster. Images are often credited with inspiring protest, generating violence or producing apathy: Susan Sontag reassesses these claims by tracing the long history of the representation of the pain of others - from Goya's Disasters of War to photographic records of the Civil War, World War I, the lynching of blacks in the American South, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi concentration camps, and contemporary images from Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, or New York on 11 September 2001. This book also tells us how we make (and understand) war today, using numerous examples from history and a number of theses from unexpected literary sources. Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Burke, Wordsworth, Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf all contribute to this fascinating reflection on the modern view of violence and atrocity. The book also contains a searing critique of the provincialism of certain media 'experts' who denigrate the reality of war and substitute a casual discourse of a new universal 'society of the spectacle' for a political understanding of the conflict. Just as On Photography invited us to rethink the nature of our modernity, Facing the Pain of Others will change our appreciation not only of the uses and meanings of images, but also of the nature of war, the limits of compassion and the obligations of conscience.
| Condition | Used - Very Good |
|---|---|
| Language | France |
| Illustrated | No |
| Publicaton Date | Jan 1, 2010 |
| Year | 2010 |
| Author / Cartographer / Photographer | Sontag Susan |
| Editor | Bourgois |
| First edition | No |
| Signed edition | No |
| Signed binding | No |
| Armorial binding | No |
| Binding / Format | Softcover |
| Size | 20 x 12 cm |
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