Regarding the Pain of Others- chapter 1 & 2

The author of Regarding the Pain of Others , Susan Sontag,  brings up many important points about photography in the first couple chapters. She defiantly  shows how passionate she is about war images and photography. She never once says that she is passionate about war photography but it comes out in her writing. She writes in a very powerful way.  These chapters mainly explained how powerful photography is and many people forget how powerful it actually is. She talks about how war photographs show what is real, instead of ignoring what is going on in the world. These chapters also explain that photographs of war are used to shock people and scare people so they understand the insanity of war and how bad war actually is. Photographs are more powerful than we all know. A picture of dead soldiers really shows the realness of war and doesn't try to hide the blood or bad parts of war. If photographs try to make war look good than people won't understand what those soldiers are really going through.  These chapters explain how photography can be used for advertising to get people to feel a certain way about the image or product being sold.

A quote I really liked from chapter two (page 25) is, "Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real."  - Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann

This quote really made me think and showed me how powerful war photographs are. They are real and these images can not be ignored.