cover foto capture dari Susan Sontag interview (1995) – Manufacturing Intellect youtube (terlampir dibawah)
Pengantar Jalan Kepada Gagasan Penting Susan Sontag
Ten photos that changed how we see human rights – Jane Lydon on conversation.com
Visual theorists have taken very different positions regarding these images and their effects. Many have noted the use of the camera in perpetrating these acts of torture, literally constituting them as forms of spectacular violence and providing ‘trophies’ of sadism, in a historical genealogy that includes the photography of lynching in the United States.19 As critic Susan Sontag pointed out, ‘the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken – with the per – petrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives’.20 Despite the sadistic pleasure evident in the Abu Ghraib trophy photos, Judith Butler argues that it is not the camera that is to blame but the perpetrators and the military system that sanctioned their behaviour. However, even Sontag concluded that their impact was ‘not because of the photographs but because of what the photographs reveal to be happening, happening with the complicity of a chain of command’. Her simple conclusion: ‘Unstoppable’.21
Baca pula pengantar buku Visualising Human Right yang ditulis pula oleh JANE LYDON(dalam hal ini adalah editor buku)
Collective Memory: the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda – Rebecka Tagt
Susan Sontag argues that ‘What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.’ (2003: 76). The activity of collective remembering, which is inseparable from power relations (Gillis 1994), is then according to Sontag a demanding of the importance of one narrative over another. It could also be explained as a hegemonic discourse that is used in relation to certain historic events. Sontag (2003) also points out that individual memory is not reproducible and that this is the only type of memory there is. Collective memory is, therefore, a type of oxymoron. It is not a valid term in a literal sense. It can, however, be used providing that we understand its constructed character. It is, however, subjective and serves particular ideological positions (Gillis 1994). Since collective memories are social constructs, who does the stipulating? The hegemonic discourse, utilised to talk about certain events, could be said to stipulate the narrative to be told. What this discourse is depends on the historical situation and on the event in question. Sontag (2003) suggests that pictures, linked to a specific story, are a crucial part of this stipulating that is collective memory. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (2007) are discussing the witnessing of events through images and visual culture. They argue that images can reinforce textual discourses but that we increasingly also question their truth value (Guerin and Hallas 2007: 2).
Referensi yang dimaksudkan di artikel ini Buku Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. 131 pp.
2 Review Film Joshua Oppenheimer Dengan Menggunakan Pisau Analisis Susan Sontag
The Act of Killing: Authorship as Performance and the Mythology of National Identity – Aruna Ekanayake
*Susan Sontag disebutkan hingga 5 kali
The act of grieving
Jerry Whyte weighs Joshua Oppenheimer’s elegantly restrained new film, THE LOOK OF SILENCE, against his more flamboyant companion piece, The Act of Killing, and wonders where the audience went.
*Susan Sontag disebutkan hingga 9 kali
Tentang Susan Sontag dan Dua Bukunya
**Kedua buku Susan Sontag On Photography dan Regarding the Pain of Others tersedia onlinenya namun karena kemungkina besar illegal tidak dicantumkan disini (sila googling)
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about. What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs—of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more—and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs—think of the Vietnam War. (For a counter-example, think of the Gulag Archipelago, of which we have no photographs.) But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. The same law holds
Susan Sontag On Photography hal 14-15
Regarding the Torture of Others- SUSAN SONTAG
Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word ”genocide” while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks’ time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib — and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay — by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: ”any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.” (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3 — common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 — and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention declares, ”No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors.
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What Susan Sontag Saw – Benjamin Moser
‘The pictures will not go away’: Susan Sontag’s lifelong obsession with suffering – Benjamin Moser
“The pictures will not go away,” she wrote. “That is the nature of the digital world in which we live … Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and so much easier to forget.”
Soon after the essay was published, Sontag elected to have a bone marrow transplant. “Torture is not too strong a word,” a friend of hers said. But her own bouts with the camera were not over. As she underwent the terrible treatment, her partner, Annie Leibovitz, was taking pictures of her: bloated, writhing, and then, finally, dead. When these pictures were published, after Sontag’s death, they ignited a fierce debate. The questions – about the ethics of photography, about how to regard the pain of others – were a homage to Sontag’s final thoughts.
John Berger and Susan Sontag To Tell A Story 1983
John Berger and Susan Sontag speak about story telling and about the ethic of photography
On Photography. Susan Sontag. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1977. 207
Sontag: On Photography Derral Cheatwood University of Baltimore
How images fail to convey war’s horror – Neal Ascherson
Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. 131 pp.
Picture doesn’t speak for themselves” they need a historical and geographical context. Can we understand the war by an image? No.
Susan Sontag introducing Regarding the Pain of Others
Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today. How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newspapers) affect us? Are viewers inured–or incited–to violence by the depiction of cruelty?
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity–from Goya’s The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001. In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag once again changes the way we think about the uses and meanings of images in our world, and offers an important reflection about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time.
Features an analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. This title alters our thinking about the uses and meanings of images, and about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience
Perpustakaan Online Genosida 1965-1966 