When photographs aren’t enough

“Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us……[they] don’t tell us everything we need to know.”

I’m just coming to the end of Susan Sontag’s seminal essay on our response to images of horror, Regarding the Pain of Others. It covers much of the ground frequently discussed on duckrabbit and other concerned photography sites – public apathy towards photojournalistic images, the aestheticism of violence and the truth or deception of images.

G’wan. You really should read it.