Susan Sontag | Photo Courtesy: www.sfgate.com
The social critic Susan Sontag was born on this day in 1933.
In a time when sentiments run amok and imagination is penalized, Sontag offers her insights on the limits of censorship.
A just/discriminating censorship is impossible.
Sontag was also a committed human rights and political activist. She was particularly involved during the Siege of Sarajevo and the Vietnam War.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, reflecting on the need for the medium of photography, she writes:
“Such images … [are] an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible?”
She writes in Looking at War in the December 2002 The New Yorker Issue,
In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities that a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people’s pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses: a call for peace; a cry for revenge; or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.
Susan Sontag was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction for In America. On 13 January 2010, she was immortalized when the Sarajevo Theater Square was officially renamed to Theater Square of Susan Sontag.
Read Susan Sontag on Moral Courage and the Power of Principled Resistance to Injustice and Looking at War.
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