Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Get Book

Book Description
A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Get Book

Book Description
A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374248583
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Get Book

Book Description
Publisher Description

Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141914955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Get Book

Book Description
Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience. 'Powerful, fascinating. Sontag is our outstanding contemporary writer in the moralist tradition'Sunday Times 'A coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering'The New York Times 'A far-reaching set of ruminations on human suffering, the nature of goodness, the lures, deceptions and truth of images . . . in short, a summary of what it means to be alive and alert in the twentieth century'Independent 'Sontag is on top form: firing devastating questions'Los Angeles Times 'Simple, elegant, fiercely persuasive'Metro One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

On Photography

On Photography PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780795000508
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism. One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, "On Photography" first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as " a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." It begins with the famous " In Plato' s Cave" essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching " Brief Anthology of Quotations."

Believing Is Seeing

Believing Is Seeing PDF Author: Errol Morris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143124250
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
Academy Award–winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography In his inimitable style, Errol Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs. With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris shows how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal, and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Each essay in this book is part detective story, part philosophical meditation, presenting readers with a conundrum, and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception, from one of America’s most provocative observers.

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World PDF Author: Elaine Scarry
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195036018
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book

Book Description
Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

Outgrowing the Pain

Outgrowing the Pain PDF Author: Eliana Gil
Publisher: Dell
ISBN: 0307422453
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Get Book

Book Description
“Anyone who had a troubled childhood ought to read this book.”—Anne H. Cohn, D.P.H., Executive Director, National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse Do you have trouble finding friends, lovers, acquaintances? Once you find them, do they dump on you, take advantage of you, or leave? Are you in a relationship you know isn't good for you? Are you still trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up? Are you drinking too much, eating too much or trying to numb your pain with drugs of any kind? These are just a few of the problems abused children experience when they become adults. You may not realize you were abused. You may think your parents didn't mean it, didn't know better, or that others had it much worse. You may not even have made the connection between the past and your current problems. Outgrowing the Pain is an important book for any adult who was abused or neglected in childhood. It's an important book for professionals who help others. It's a book of questions that can pinpoint and illuminate destructive patterns. The answers you discover can lead to a life filled with new insight, hope, and love. “The best book available to help survivors cope and understand.”—Dan Sexton, Director, Childhelp's National Abuse Hotline “An invaluable aid for adult survivors of child abuse.”—Suzanne M. Sgroi, M.D., Executive Director, New England Clinical Associates

The Civil Contract of Photography

The Civil Contract of Photography PDF Author: Ariella Azoulay
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1935408372
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 586

Get Book

Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.

Styles of Radical Will

Styles of Radical Will PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853581
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book

Book Description
Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

3 Works

3 Works PDF Author: Martha Rosler
Publisher: Halifax, N.S. : Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
ISBN: 9780919616202
Category : Alcohol
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Get Book

Book Description
"Martha Rosler traces the ways in which art draws its meaning from within its social and political frameworks. The book's two artworks and a related essay exemplify and investigate the social embeddedness of art. They suggest how changing times and changing circumstances affect not only the form and meaning of photography but also its effects on its audience ... The artwork, 'The restoration of high culture in chile' (1977) is a photo and text work that, in fictionalized form, examines the various degrees of political anaesthesia and moral corruption implied by a successful adaptation to unquestioned and abstract notions of high culture ... The photo-and-text work 'The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems' (1974-1975) throws into question the ability of contemporary urban photography to continue the historical potential of social documentary photography. Its accompanying work, 'In, around, and afterthoughts,' written especially for the first edition of 3 works, is a fully developed critical essay in which this question is explored more systematically"--Publisher's website, viewed on March 13, 2015.