Regarding his suffering

Author: Susan Sontag [USA]
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: This book is Susan Sontag's second monograph on photography after On Photography, and also her last work published posthumously. It focuses on war photography, exploring the relationship between the suffering reflected in images and the viewers. Horrific images may evoke the viewers' compassion, but the sense of helplessness they evoke makes these images, which are all-pervasive yet alien to life, seem redundant and absurd. If we believe in the content of images without thinking, our moral judgment will only weaken. Sontag writes about images in pure text, providing viewers with space to confront "the suffering of others." Susan Sontag was born in New York, USA, in 1933. She graduated from the University of Chicago and later pursued graduate studies in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Oxford University. In the 1980s, she served as the director of the International PEN Club and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993. The planned works for the "Sontag Collected Works" include Against Interpretation, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, The Form of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn, and Regarding the Pain of Others. Among these, Against Interpretation and Illness as Metaphor have been published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House, while Where the Stress Falls and Regarding the Pain of Others were scheduled to be published before Susan Sontag's visit to China in May 2004. Under the Sign of Saturn and The Form of Radical Will were published in October 2004.