Regarding the Pain of Others.

By Susan Sontag

ISBN: 9781466853577

Printed: 2003

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton. London

Edition: First edition

Dimensions 14 × 19 × 2 cm
Language

Language: English

Size (cminches): 14 x 19 x 2

£29.00
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Item information

Description

In the original dustsheet. Brown cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feel and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Regarding the Pain of Others is a 2003 book-length essay by Susan Sontag, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was her last published book before her death in 2004. It is regarded by many to be a follow-up or addendum to On Photography, despite the fact that the two essay collections convey Sontag’s radically different opinions about photography. The essay is especially interested in war photography. Using photography as evidence for her opinions, Sontag sets out to answer one of the three questions posed in Virginia Woolf’s book Three Guineas, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?”

While debunking a certain number of common misconceptions (including some to which she contributed) concerning images of pain, horror, and atrocity, Regarding the Pain of Others both underscores their importance and undercuts hopes that they can communicate very much. On the one hand, narrative and framing confer upon images most of their meaning, and on the other, Sontag says, those who have not lived through such things “can’t understand, can’t imagine” the experiences such images represent.

 Book-length essay on subject. The author’s last book. Now considered a contemporary classic. Review Copy. Review Material laid-in. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, of which there are several. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now rare. Presents Susan Sontag’s “Regarding The Pain of Others”. A brilliant, melancholy meditation on war photography. The sequel-of-sorts to “On Photography” (1977), Sontag revisits some of the same issues she raised in her earlier book, and subjects them to renewed scrutiny. While relatively short, it ranges nimbly across a breadth of cultural and intellectual references. She re-evaluates positively what photography can do to create awareness, arouse indignation and sympathy, and make people act on the basis of images (rather than narrative accounts) of other people’s suffering. As such, like its predecessor, it is an ethics of photography, which is why both are widely misunderstood, as photography = idealized beauty for most photographers and viewers. Her tough-minded re-evaluation of her own work is something both critics and admirers of Susan Sontag have come to expect from her. She was the intellectual par excellence, who never hesitated to change her mind. Were it not for her formidable intellect, her agonizing self-examination would be merely of passing, topical interest. Intentionally or not, this is her final statement on ethics and its inescapable, co-equal power, aesthetics

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