Sontag

  What is your main takeaway from Sontag’s essay?

It seems like Sontag is discussing how photographs of war and hardships can be skewed to fit either side of a war, but no matter what we are utilizing images of suffering in order to justify previous or future actions. There is also some sympathy which is brought out by the photographer through the viewer, but mainly the images are used to rally anger or sadness.

2.  Give at least two smaller takeaways from the essay.  Things that you found 

to be of particular interest.  This can include things that surprised you or provoked 

some thought.

It was really striking when Sontag says "Wars are now also living room sights and sounds." People become desensitized to hardships because they are so commonly televised. The news is constantly running stories of shootings here, bombings there, etc. Younger children are becoming exposed to these hardships and images earlier on in their lives, and eventually you just become numb to it if it seems like the norm.

I also like when she discusses Woolf's statement: "[photographs] are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact..." Photographs and videos are some of the only things (save for photoshopped images) that can be looked and and taken to be true. The argument comes from the subject. Not the photograph itself. Earlier in the essay Sontag talked about a boy killed outside of a Sbarro's in Jerusalem and how each side of the fighting going on their would view the image, despite seeing the exact same image. The truth is a boy died, but either side can take their surrounding truths and apply it to the image. 

3.  Upload an image of pain/suffering to your blog and discuss it.  You can be 

straightforward about this, or you can take a well-known image that you may 

look at differently after reading Sontag.  

I found this image while looking over the My Lai Massacre wiki page which was linked on the blog:

I have seen this image before, but never had context for why or when the image was taken. The first few sentences of the wiki article are horrifying. One of the lesser bad parts of the My Lai Massacre was what happened back home as a result. Americans were already angry about the Vietnam war, and rightfully so. However, many soldiers were over in Vietnam solely to do their duty, and because of these soldiers who decided to rape and pillage Americans were even more distrusting of the few decent soldiers. This image is heartbreaking because the subjects were killed within minutes after the photograph was taken. The woman in the front is fixing up her buttons because she had also just been sexually assaulted, which was rampant during the killings. 

The worst part of the entire article was where they mentioned how a platoon took a lunch break during the killings. The fact that these people could stomach gang raping, defiling, and murdering innocent civilians like the ones pictured above, and then be fine to eat lunch is amazing (in a bad way.)