5 Quotes by Sontag

What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it— say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in an other country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half's worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.

There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.

It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions.