Sontag, Regarding Pain

It is a short read, and held my attention despite meandering quite a bit. It lacks a central thesis or cohesive argument to link together the various ideas, questions, and observations within. Some of her questions (e.g. how does exposure to violent imagery affect our reaction to / perception of real violence) are better addressed in social science journals, and many of her observations will be familiar to anyone who has bothered to think about the issues she addresses. Thankfully her tone is neither academic nor didactic (though not always eloquent), and she does run across the occasional small ephiphany in her circituous path. Mostly, the book comes across as a discussion starter, a discussion which must continue within and among its readers - based on our beliefs more than hers (which remain opaque, due rather to their nuance, personal nature, or incoherence...I'm not sure).

More an extended essay than a book, you won't be wasting your time by reading it, but I don't think it is worth purchase (unless you can find a used pb copy).

The lack of thesis and cohesive argument is, in my experience, typical of Sontag. I have not idea why publishers go for her stuff. She did the same thing in an essay on translation published by the Times Literary Supplement. She began talking about translators as the custodians of literary quality, and ended up telling everyone to bloody-well go and learn English. Strange.

The TLS took the essay down shortly after I wrote about it, here. (I'm not saying that my devastating treatment of her essay was the reason they took it down, you understand, but I would if I could.)

I didn't mean to give the impression that I hadn't read it becasue I have. I agree with you both more or less but did find it to be illuminating in terms of the history of photo journalism and the lucidity with which it was written. The conclusions may not all be profound but an interesting read none the less.

It's been a while since I've read the book, but I wasn't put off by the lack of a central, concrete thesis. It felt more like an exploration of ideas than a hammered-out argument, but I think that Sontag was trying to feel her way out of an intellectual impasse. Why don't pictures of suffering elicit sufficient sympathy from viewers? It's a good book to read in conjunction with Roland Barthe's Camera Lucida (also nice and short), which asks questions about the nature of photography and how we respond to images.

i just picked this up and am about three chapters in. its lack of images is really curious - maybe that's deliberate or maybe it's the publisher being stingy about printing costs, but one of the great things about "camera lucida" is that the images discussed are all reprinted; it's interesting to weigh your reactions against barthes' own when mulling his notions of punctum, etc. although many of the photographs sontag mentions are familiar and easily conjured in the mind's eye, it's a bit annoying that the text expects you to be familiar with all of them. i agree that she introduces thought-provoking ideas very haphazardly, and doesn't push them nearly as far as i would have liked (or even expected, though i'm pretty ambivalent about sontag).

i haven't read "on photography" but i imagine the two are interesting in tandem. in this vein, i'd recommend barabara norfleet's "looking at death," which encourages the type of meditation that sontag's engaged in.