"The weight of words, the shock of photos"

Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others integrates her book On Photography and war, which is highly relevent in the midst of a war that has found its way to American soil.

I am going to reiterate a few quotes from her book, none of which need any explanation or personal opinions, and I will continue to do so as I make my way through her book, when I stumble across any bits that are interesting:

"Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is 'some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting' that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy."

"War is a man's game - that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male."

"the photographs say, this is what it's like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

"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."

"The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated..."

"The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human. (Suffering from natural causes, such as illness or childbirth, is scantily represented in the history of art; that caused by accident, virtually not at all - as if there were no such thing as suffering by inadvertence or misadventure)"

"It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked...there is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching"

"But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it, or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."