politicnewsbusterinsiderpostreview: Making sense of images of devastation in Ukraine

Monday, 7 March 2022

Making sense of images of devastation in Ukraine

March 7, 2022

As Russia continues its assault on Ukraine, horrific photos of civilian deaths filter into even the casual American news consumer's life. On the evening news and in the New York Times, I've seen photos of families killed by mortar strikes and soldiers lying dead in the snow.

This barrage of brutal images got me thinking about Susan Sontag's 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others—which I thought was untouchably brilliant when I was in college but which, upon my hasty rereading, I couldn't rightly recommend to anyone. Sontag, who spent the last 15 years of her life in a relationship with celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, followed up her 1977 On Photography with a meditation on war photography, asking whether graphic war images promote pacifism or incite further violence.

Already in 2003, following the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Afghanistan, disturbing images of war had become ubiquitous in the papers, on TV, and online. Already, Sontag understood how war images can be misrepresented: "All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions," she wrote. "During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children's deaths could be used and reused. "

I wonder if Sontag, who died in 2004, could foresee just how extreme the inundation of war images—and disinformation—would become with the rise of social media. I have seen a subreddit once dedicated to videos of shopping mall "Karens" overrun with videos of apparent war crimes. (The comments invariably say, "I have been desensitized to violence, but this video broke me.") On TikTok, I witness the life of a young woman who lives in a bomb shelter in Ukraine, occasionally emerging to film the rubble of the city where she spent her childhood. When the evening news announcer tells me, "The following video is disturbing," I remember how, as a child during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I used to avert my eyes. Now, I can't look away.

I'm no Susan Sontag, and I can't say whether this constant consumption of human misery is good or bad or stimulating or desensitizing. But if you, like me and most people I know, feel compelled to bear witness to the atrocities in Ukraine, I urge you to consider what you're seeing, who filmed it, and how it affects your thoughts about war.

—Abigail Weinberg