Too deep for tears
Michael Glover
REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS by Susan Sontag Hamish Hamilton. £12.99, pp. 117, ISBN 024142075 DON MCCULLIN by Don McCullin Jonathan Cape, £17.50, pp. 294, ISBN 0224071181 1 mages of war are frankly disgusting, say some, because they enable us to reflect upon the pain and the suffering of others at a comfortable distance from reality. Oh, how we suffer and suffer in our over-stuffed armchairs! Not at all, others counter-argue with equal
vehemence from another room of that same air-conditioned penthouse, if you make the horrors of war vivid enough, it will become almost self-evident that war is an insane activity. People will stop waging war immediately and convert all weapons into useful agricultural implements. Unfortunately, this has not happened. Guns don't generally get melted down. They get polished.
What all this means is that there is an ongoing debate about the probity of images of human suffering as we see them daily in our newspapers and on our tele vision screens. Should we applaud or deplore their ubiquitous presence? Susan Sontag's book-length essay, a kind of follow-on to a collection of essays she wrote more than 20 years ago called On Photography, weighs the arguments in the balance.
This little book describes how photographs work upon us: it describes the changing nature of war in the 20th century; it also offers us a potted history of photojournalism, beginning with some of those pioneers who covered the Crimean War (Roger Fenton) and the American Civil War (Mathew Brady and others).
What do photographs do? Well, they haunt us. They do not require translation or mediation of any kind. They merely say — more shout than say — don't forget this! And, often, we don't. We can't. The image will always be too much with us.
Unfortunately, photographs, though so emotionally immediate, are not analytical tools, and they can lie, brazenly, or, at best, manipulate. Did Robert Capa's famous image of the dying Republican soldier in the Spanish Civil War really die, pitching backwards, arms flung wide, as he was being shot on camera? Maybe. Maybe not.
Why does the media have this obsession in the first place? Well, there is no denying that war and suffering are perennially seductive. Why do we slow down when we see an accident? Perhaps the media merely feeds us what we crave — if it bleeds, it leads, according to the tabloids.
This, however, is a descent into cynicism of a kind that Sontag refuses to buy. She regards images of suffering as important vehicles of knowledge, and the best of the photo-journalists of the 20th century as brave witnesses to truths that need to he told, over and over again. Lest we forget.
Amongst her foremost heroes is Don McCullin, that boy from north London who failed his eleven-plus exam and went on to become one of the most reckless, brave and unflinchingly honest photogra phers of war there has ever been. A new anthology of his photographs — from Vietnam, Biafra and elsewhere — has just been published. The only aspect of this book that seems out of keeping with its sobriety and its gravity is the introduction by that jowly old newshound Harold
Evans. which manages, amidst other failures of tact and tone, to make a wince
inducing reference to McCullin's 'exciting and emotional stories'. Exciting! Is it exciting to die? It is certainly emotional, so a relative once told me. Brave Sir Harry should have picked his way with a little more tact through all those bleached bones.
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