Our mind is a vast space that enables us to store multitudes of things. One of the main things we accumulate in the brain are pictures. Pictures stimulate our memory allowing us to remember past occurrences. Photos leave the events captured still in time open to interpretation. Photos such as: the Nazi Death Camps, War in Bosnia or My Lai Massacre. They all can be described very vividly but the truth behind the photos is not entirely clear. Pictures are only a way to remember theses past events. As we advance further in our technology we are losing our ability to understand what the photos really mean and the truth of these events can become terribly misconstrued. “Regarding the Pain of Others” is a creatively crafted piece that has been extremely effective in teaching me how to not only remember through pictures but how to understand the background of pictures. The Nazi Death Camp, Bosnia War and My Lai Massacre photos evoke great emotion and I interpret them as horrible occurrences. Yet, I still need to look further into understanding the events captured in those frames; my interpretations alone do not tell the whole story.
Some of the World War II photos taken by Margaret White were of Buchenwald[*]. There are eighteen men young and old standing behind a rusty barbed wire fence with a myriad of looks on their faces. A few of the men look angry and others looked in a weird way, relieved. Behind the men there is a building that resembles a barn with the two front doors left open that stands on the same muddy ground as them. The men look fine to me, other than the fact that the barbed wire fence indicates they’re imprisoned. They must have done something wrong that would justify their imprisonment. On April 8, 1945 Margaret Bourke-White was with the General Patton’s Army when they liberated the Buchenwald and took this photograph. The eighteen men White photographed were all Jews. They were in fact all imprisoned, but for what? They were imprisoned because of the mere fact the they were Jewish; imagine being jailed and killed for who you are when there is nothing you can do to change your heritage. The Jewish men had done nothing wrong they were just rounded up, imprisoned and killed. The photos described by Sontag of the My Lai Massacre are just as confusing. When I looked at them I believed that the American soldiers attacked the enemy in an effort to win the Vietnam War. However, once I have read the real story I understand that the soldiers deliberately murdered 500 unarmed civilians. Also, Sontag wrote:
“They (the pictures) became important in bolstering the opposition to a war which was far from inevitable, far from intractable, and could have been stopped much sooner. Therefore one could feel an obligation to look at theses pictures, gruesome as they were, because there was something to be done, right now, about what they depicted(Sontag 263).”
The understanding of photographs adds a whole other dimension to their meaning. Apart from the description of what actually occurred there were larger effects because of the photos. The photos raised public outcry and prompted people more to join the fight to end the standoff Vietnam War. I could have never known this without that insight. Because I knew of the difficulty American soldiers had determining their enemy in Vietnam because of the thick bush and guerilla style warfare the Vietcong employed. In addition, I was not alive during the time period to experience the reaction to the gruesome photos. These descriptions shed light on what really happened and allow me to understand the injustice suffered that my eyes could not decipher. Otherwise, my eyes would have cheated me into thinking that the My Lai Massacre was a killing of the enemy that could be easily justified. And that all the Jewish people were jailed during a time of war for committing crimes or being held prisoners of war by the enemy.Night. The Jewish people are still there because they have nowhere to go and everything was taken from them; the devastation of war had destroyed everything they once knew. In addition, I read the description of a photo from the war in Bosnia. Sontag wrote,
“ The image is stark, one of the most enduring of the Balkan wars: a Serb militiaman casually kicking a dying Muslim woman in the head. It tells you everything you need to know(263).”
A description from the photographer does tell me everything; the photo was taken in Bijeljina in April 1992 in the first month of the Serb invasion; the militiaman is smoking out of his left hand; his rifle is in his right hand; his right is drawn back ready to kick the Muslim woman in the head. By just looking at the photo I could have never derived any of this information. I have never seen this photo but the image the description creates in my head of blatant disrespect and inhumanity is ridiculous. If I had a gun I might have aimed the crosshairs right to the militiaman’s forehead and blasted him into eternity. The description evoked such raw emotion and a sense of sorrow for the dying woman that I wanted to do something about it. However, these emotions and images I drew up in still tell me nothing about the story behind the picture. This allows me to say the second sentence of the quote is completely false. The photos cannot tell you everything because the photos are open to my interpretation. There are two finite detail given in the first sentence and they tell me only of what nationality the people are. Similarly the photo of the blockhouse only allows me to describe finite details of the people’s surroundings. There is now way for me to tell who or where they are, or what exactly happened to everyone in either photo.
“As Hannah Arendt pointed out soon after the end of the Second World War, all the photographs and newsreels of the concentration camps are misleading because they show camps at the moment the Allied troops marched in. What makes the images unbearable- the pile of corpses, the skeletal survivors- was not at all typical for the camps, which, when they were functioning, exterminated their inmates systematically (by gas, not starvation and illness), then immediately cremated them(261).”
Sontag’s words clearly illustrate how photos do not help us understand what happened at Buchenwald. I would not have comprehended that some of the buildings like in the last photo were actually used to gas and cremate Jewish people. Indicating to me that the people in the photos were not dying only because of malnutrition. However, the Germans were systematically killing the Jewish people in not just Buchenwald but similar camps like Auschwitz and Dachau. The photo only allows me to see the forefront of what happened at the Nazi Death Camps. When in the background something much worse and much more involved than what we already knew had happened.
Together if one looks at my photos without any description how much could they tell me? They could tell me their own interpretation of the events, which more than likely would mirror my thoughts. However, if gave them only the description of the photo they would then know everything about my photos and could create pictures of them in their head because they now understand what went on. Therefore, photos are easier to remember and they stay with us but they do not help us completely understand the story behind photo. When we look at war photos our emotions run high because of the shock the photos leave us with. Our emotions make us who we are but they make us irrational and hinder our ability to reason and understand.

Posted by Shaz at 1:54 PM