“Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of the extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it” (42).
This quote seems like it’s supposed to be kind of sarcastic, but also thought provoking. The citizens of the world deserve to know what is going on; what has happened throughout history. However, there is a limit to what most people can actually do. Maybe if it were easier to help then these situations wouldn’t feel so hopeless.
If it were easier to help people then would we have even worse situations, thus making the cycle continue forever?
“When Woolf notes that one of the photographs she has been sent shows the corpse of a man or woman so mangled that it could as well be that of a dead pig, her point is that the scale of war’s murderousness destroys what identifies people as individuals, even as human beings” (61).
Sontag continues to expand on this concept, which is terribly fascinating, but this gruesome practice and viewing is summarized pretty well here. Taking away individuality by turning someone into a number or a symbol or even nothing, which is what the quote is talking about, has been practiced for centuries to distance the general public from the horrifying subject. It’s hard to sympathize with a number. Trying to see the person underneath the anonymity is what the viewers must do. Instead of looking and leaving with a feeling of general disgust, I want to know that the figure is human, is a person, no matter how beaten and mangled they are now.
How can we see the individual when they have been framed as a statistic?
