on growth and guilt
a retrospective on susan sontag's essays "regarding the pain of others" (published in 2003)
london, 2024
“In contrast to a written account - which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference and vocabulary is pitched at a certain readership - a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.”
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Growth and guilt aren’t often seen to be synonymous, but multiple truths exist. Truths wherein you can feel overwhelming love and protectiveness over your loved ones; an inherent desire to please and bring comfort. When the crows feet by my mothers eyes appear or my little sisters arms wrap around me, it validates my existence. Multiple truths exist.
So what does it mean when it feels like betrayal to grow? When it feels like advancement is an ornate, dressed up and embellished version of abandonment?
This came to me as I sat with my family, looking at old pictures. It’s strange to regard yourself as an entirely different person, but even stranger when the truth of the photos feels fabricated, as though it were an entirely different life all together. Everything in these photos is familiar; the same type of familiarity as my childhood bedroom floorplan. My younger self would instinctually hop from the light switch to my bed before the dark could grab at my ankles. Now that I’m older, there seems to be an artificial shine coating this familiarity. It sounds dramatic, but it is almost as though I’m waging a war against myself. War.
Multiple truths exist, they say, but how can it be war? I felt shameful, looking at these photos of a seemingly comfortable childhood when children are currently being stripped of theirs. How can it be a war?
It isn’t a war.
“To photographic corroboration of the atrocities committed by one’s side, the standard response is that the pictures are a fabrication, that no such atrocity even took place.” Sustan Sontag’s collection of essays shed light on how engulfed we are in our own photos. Our own stories, limited by the borders that the 2006 Canon 30D set in place, are nothing in comparison to the multiple stories existing in real time.
We are complacent when opening the news. “Violence turns anybody subjected to into a thing.” Sontag’s bleak diction is accurate, isn’t it? Pity has turned to apathy and we guilelessly move through our lives. Isn’t incessant suffering enough to make us stop and think? We’ve conjured so many wars inside of us, that’s it’s difficult to see beyond them.
The intersection between conflict and photography is imperative in the case of the Palestinian boy holding his brothers limbs and the Palestinian father moving broken walls to find his children and when I was looking at old family photos. They aren’t threatened by the dark, because their ankles are swimming in death.
We are just on the other side of the photographs and videos, yet there is a lot of nuance and pain I struggle to translate to words. I try do so because it’s better than nothing.
We do so because it’s better than nothing.
We strive for the Palestinian plight. To nurture yourself in the process is not an act of selfishness, but the opposite. In return, we’re stronger and can work towards a future where borders no longer daunt them. Where photos will be moments to treasure, not pleas to prove that they are humans. Where Palestine will be free.