Regarding The Pain Of Others Sontag Analysis

Every day, people see pictures. Whether they are selfies on social media, family pictures on the refrigerator, or photos from a family vacation, pictures have a large effect on people when they see them. However, the photographs with the largest impact are horrifying photographs of others, especially those on the news. Shocking photos, like ones from a war, can make people uncomfortable and cause them to act, like protesting wars or writing petitions. Sometimes, the media will not publish images that are difficult to look at because they know the damaging effect these photos could have on people. In her article “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Sontag uses ethical and logical appeals to show that disturbing photographs are highly impactful.
She contrasts these two events to show how people have different reactions to photos based on their relationship to the subjects in the pictures. Sontag references the “photographs taken between 1975 and 1979 at a secret prison at a former high school in Tuol Sleng, a suburb of Phnom Penh, the killing house of more than fourteen thousand Cambodians charged with being either ‘intellectuals’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’” (60). Americans felt bad for the Cambodians who were being executed, but they did not feel the need to make a difference because most Americans were not related to people from Cambodia. They did not feel a connection to the people they saw in the images. Sontag does not write about how Americans tried to make a difference in Cambodia, because Americans did not do that. However, she writes about how the victims were anonymous, “even if named, unlikely to be known to “us”” (61). The names of the Cambodian victims would be unknown because most people did not know any of the victims personally, nor would they be affected by it. Sontag describes how the Cambodians, condemned to death, sat for their “portraits”. Although the names of the prison photographer “is known -- Nhem Ein -- and can be cited” (61), these up close photos of the prisoners only display the number of the prisoner,
Censorship has existed long before the Vietnam War, however, it took the Vietnam War for the American government to realize that censorship is important. Countries fighting in World War I used censorship. Armies including the “German and the French high command allowed only a few selected military photographers near the fighting” (64-65). The Germans and the French were smart to not let the people of their countries see most of the fighting during the war. They knew their people would be affected by seeing photos of their fellow citizens, or even friends or family members, being brutally murdered. The logic in Sontag’s argument is that the government of each country knew that photographs of their soldiers dying would cause people to get upset. By preventing the people from seeing the photos, the French and Germans did not know all of the atrocities going on in the war, so they did not protest to bring their troops home, like America did during the Vietnam War. Sontag describes how the Boers in the Boer War, “thought it would be morale-building for their own troops to circulate a horrifying picture of dead British soldiers.” (64) Showing the dead enemy was used as a tool to inspire the military. Pictures of one’s dead has the opposite effect, it is devastating to see and in this specific case infuriated the British. In conclusion, Susan Sontag uses a logical appeal to show the importance of censorship for a