Reviews with content warning for War - Das Leiden anderer betrachten

Reviews tagging 'War'

Das Leiden anderer betrachten by Reinhard Kaiser, Susan Sontag

17 reviews

americattt's review against another edition

challenging dark informative reflective slow-paced

4.5

"The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan. And photographs help construct ━and revise ━our sense of a more distant past, with the posthumous shocks engineered by the circulation of hitherto unknown photographs. Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas "memories," and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory━ part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction."

Content Warnings

honeyvoiced's review against another edition

Go to review page

informative reflective

4.25

Content Warnings

flara's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark informative slow-paced

3.5

I had a love-hate relationship with this text and having finished the book 2 months prior, I still can't quite decide whether I liked it or not.

I was put off at the very beginning by Sontag's argument that wars have always belonged to men, and that women would not choose violence to resolve their power struggles (I don't have my copy of the book at the moment, I am relying solely on my memory; and so I might be mis-remembering some of the nuances). I could go on a tangent here, but that would be an entirely different discussion. I'm choosing to concentrate on what these essays entail, rather than what they're missing.

Throughout her essays, Sontag points at things that are fairly obvious, but yet I have never thought of them? This is a book about war and war photography; and the fact that the majority of famous war photographs of 19th and early 20th century were completely staged shouldn't surprise us - and yet I have never questioned their authenticity? We expect drawings/paintings/etc. to take artistic liberties, perhaps to make the real event seem more dramatic and shocking than it actually was. But we don't always hold photographs to the same standard (obviously I am not talking about studio photography here). After all, they are real-time snapshots, they should be trust-worthy. I found this especially relevant in regards to what is currently happening in Ukraine.

I really enjoyed Sontag's observations on how as a humankind we have become immune to the shocking nature of news and yet we are obsessed with gory images. We have become disengaged from the suffering of people paraded to us daily on evening news, we don't even flinch when we hear the mention of armed conflict/natural disaster/etc. At the same time, images circulating around the world are getting gorier by the minute. They are sensational. Those are the ones that grab our attention (for what could be argued are the wrong reasons). We latch onto the shocking nature of these images, rather than on the human element.

Sontag uses several war conflicts as her case studies. The one that stood out was Crimean War; if I remember correctly, this was the first war to be documented in photography. I would prefer if discussed photographs were included in the book, rather than having to look them up (was there a copyright issue?). In conclusion, I found this to be an enjoyable read. However, the opening chapter really annoyed me. Sontag certainly pointed out the obvious, even if the obvious wasn't so obvious after all. For this selfish reason I struggle to give her enough credit.

Content Warnings