Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag Read Free Book Online

in the first version of the celebrated photograph he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” (despite the title, it was not across this landscape that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture—the one that is always reproduced—he oversaw the scattering of cannonballs on the road itself. A picture of a desolate site where a great deal of dying had indeed taken place, Beato’s image of the devastated Sikandarbagh Palace involved a more thorough arrangement of its subject, and was one of the first photographic depictions of the horrific in war. The attack had taken place in November 1857, after which the victorious British troops and loyal Indian units searched the palace room by room, bayoneting the eighteen hundred surviving Sepoy defenders who were now their prisoners and throwing their bodies into the courtyard; vultures and dogs did the rest. For the photograph he took in March or April 1858, Beato constructed the ruin as an unburial ground, stationing some natives by two pillars in the rear and distributing human bones about the courtyard.
    At least they were old bones. It’s now known that the Brady team rearranged and displaced some of the recently dead at Gettysburg: the picture titled “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg” shows in fact a dead Confederate soldier who was moved from where he had fallen on the field to a more photogenic site, a cove formed by several boulders flanking a barricade of rocks, and includes a prop rifle that Gardner leaned against the barricade beside the corpse. (It seems not to have been the special rifle a sharpshooter would have used, but a common infantryman’s rifle; Gardner didn’t know this or didn’t care.) What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed.
    The photographs we are particularly dismayed to find out have been posed are those that appear to record intimate climaxes, above all, of love and death. The point of “The Death of a Republican Soldier” is that it is a real moment, captured fortuitously; it loses all value should the falling soldier turn out to have been performing for Capa’s camera. Robert Doisneau never explicitly claimed snapshot status for a photograph taken in 1950 for Life of a young couple kissing on the sidewalk near Paris’s Hôtel de Ville. Still, the revelation more than forty years later that the picture was a directorial setup with a woman and a man hired for the day to smooch for Doisneau provoked many a spasm of chagrin among those for whom it is a cherished vision of romantic love and romantic Paris. We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and of death, and those being photographed to be unaware of the camera, “off guard.” No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer.
    If we admit as authentic only photographs that result from the photographer’s having been nearby, shutter open, at just the right moment, few victory photographs will qualify. Take the action of planting a flag on a height as a battle is winding down. The famous photograph of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945, turns out to be a “reconstruction” by an Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, of the morning flag-raising ceremony that followed the capture of Mount Suribachi, done later in the day and with a larger flag. The story behind an equally iconic victory photograph, taken on May 2, 1945, by the Soviet war photographer Yevgeny Khaldei, of Russian soldiers hoisting the Red flag atop the Reichstag as Berlin continues to burn, is that the exploit was