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’The pictures will not go away’: Susan Sontag’s lifelong obsession with suffering
▻https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/17/the-pictures-will-not-go-away-susan-sontag-and-photography

... in her great collection On Photography, Sontag had called it a “predatory weapon” and said that “there is aggression implicit in every use of the camera”. Now, she saw the Abu Ghraib pictures being made by people who recorded torture exactly as they recorded everything else.

“Andy Warhol’s ideal of filming real events in real time – life isn’t edited, why should its record be edited? – has become a norm,” she wrote. “Here I am – waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school.” The camera made all events equal: “The distinction between photograph and reality – as between spin and policy – can easily evaporate.” As Warhol had predicted, it made people equal to their metaphors. “The photographs are us,” she wrote.