Michael: You know that famous saying, "The camera never lies"? Kevin: Yeah, of course. It's the ultimate truth-teller. The objective eye. Michael: Well, today we're going to explore how, for the first 100 years of war photography, the camera did almost nothing but lie. And it did so deliberately, often under government orders. Kevin: Hold on, what? I always picture those old, grainy black-and-white photos from the Civil War or something as the most real, unfiltered evidence we have. Michael: That’s what we’re all taught to think. But this whole rabbit hole comes from Susan Sontag's incredible and challenging book, Regarding the Pain of Others. Kevin: Sontag... the famous cultural critic, right? I've heard her name, but her work always seemed… intense. Michael: It is, but this book is surprisingly short and sharp. And the context is fascinating. She wrote it in 2003, right as the world was being flooded with images from 9/11 and the media was gearing up for the Iraq War. It was her last book, and she was basically revisiting her own famous ideas from the 70s, asking a really timely question: in a world saturated with images of horror, what does it even mean to look? Kevin: That’s a heavy question. And one that feels even more relevant today with social media feeds full of… well, everything. Where does she even start? Michael: She starts by completely dismantling our trust in the camera. She takes us way back, to the very first war photographers, who were basically sent in with a mission not to show the truth.

Kevin: A mission not to show the truth? That sounds like a conspiracy theory. Who was sending them? Michael: The British government, for one. Sontag tells this amazing story from the Crimean War in the 1850s. The war was a disaster for the British—military incompetence, soldiers dying from disease and frostbite. The reports coming home were terrible for public morale. Kevin: Okay, so they needed some good PR. Michael: Exactly. So they hire a photographer named Roger Fenton. He’s essentially the first-ever official war photographer. He’s sent to Crimea with a horse-drawn wagon that’s a mobile darkroom, and he has very clear instructions from the War Office: do not, under any circumstances, photograph the dead, the maimed, or the sick. Kevin: Wow. So he's basically the 19th-century version of a corporate PR guy hired to do damage control. Michael: Precisely. And the technology of the time made it easy for him. Photography required long exposure times. You couldn't just snap a picture of a battle in progress. Everything had to be posed. So Fenton’s photos are these very dignified, very clean images. You see handsome officers in pristine uniforms having a chat, or soldiers calmly tending to perfectly arranged cannons. It looks more like a distinguished gentleman's camping trip than a brutal war. Kevin: That’s wild. So there are no pictures of the actual fighting or suffering at all? Michael: None. The most famous photograph he took is called "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." It’s this bleak, empty landscape—just a rutted road littered with cannonballs. It’s haunting because of what’s not there: the thousands of bodies. It’s a portrait of absence. And even that photo is controversial. Kevin: How can a picture of an empty road be controversial? Michael: Because there are two versions of it. In one, the cannonballs are on the road. In the other, they're in the ditches on the side. Historians now believe Fenton likely moved the cannonballs onto the road himself to make the scene look more dramatic and dangerous. Kevin: He… rearranged the battlefield? For a better shot? That’s not just PR, that’s creating fiction. Michael: It’s directing. He’s a movie director, not a documentarian. And Sontag shows this wasn't a one-off. It gets even darker during the American Civil War, which is often hailed as the first war to be realistically documented. Kevin: Okay, this is where I expect the real stuff. Mathew Brady, Gettysburg, the unvarnished horror of war. Michael: That was the sales pitch. The lead photographer, Mathew Brady, famously said, "The camera is the eye of history." His team, especially a guy named Alexander Gardner, got unprecedented access from President Lincoln to photograph the battlefields. And they did capture horrific images of the dead. They were published, and for the first time, people in New York could go to a gallery and see the real cost of war. Kevin: So that’s a step toward truth, at least. Michael: It was, but the directing impulse was still there. Sontag points to research that uncovered one of the most famous Civil War photos, "Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg," was a complete fabrication. Kevin: What do you mean, fabrication? The dead soldier is right there. Michael: The soldier is real, but the scene is not. The photographer, Gardner, found the body of a young Confederate soldier elsewhere on the battlefield. He thought the soldier’s death wasn't dramatic enough where he fell. So he and his assistants dragged the body about 40 yards to a more "photogenic" location—a rocky alcove they called the "sharpshooter's den." Kevin: No way. Michael: It gets worse. They propped the soldier's head up to face the camera and even placed a prop rifle against the wall next to him to complete the story. The rifle wasn't even the type a sharpshooter would have used. They invented a narrative and staged a dead man as its main character. Kevin: That’s… ghoulish. It completely changes how I see that photo. It's not a piece of history; it's a piece of theater. It crosses a serious line from sanitizing war to actively manipulating death for a good picture. Michael: It’s a profound violation. And Sontag argues this desire for the "perfect" shot, the staged moment, haunted photography for decades. Think of the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photo. Kevin: An American icon. Michael: It was a re-enactment. The first flag-raising happened hours earlier with a smaller flag. A commander decided it wasn't dramatic enough, so he ordered a second, larger flag to be raised later that day specifically for the cameras. The iconic photo is of the second, staged event. Kevin: My whole visual history of the 20th century is starting to feel like a movie set. It makes you wonder if we've ever really seen an unstaged war. Michael: Sontag says that really only changed with the Vietnam War, where the most famous images—like the napalm girl—were almost certainly unstaged. And she says that authenticity is precisely what gave them such immense moral authority. But that raises a whole new, and maybe even more difficult, question. Kevin: Which is? Michael: Once we get the real, unstaged, undeniably horrific images of suffering… what do we do with them? Are we even allowed to look?

Kevin: What do you mean, "allowed to look"? If it's happening, shouldn't we see it? Isn't that our responsibility? Michael: That’s the conventional wisdom. But Sontag turns the lens from the photographer onto us, the viewers, and it gets very uncomfortable, very fast. She brings up a story from Plato, written over two thousand years ago, about a man named Leontius. Kevin: Okay, a little philosophy. Let's hear it. Michael: Leontius is walking near Athens and comes across the bodies of executed criminals lying on the ground. He’s immediately disgusted and tries to turn away. He literally covers his eyes. But he feels this intense, competing desire to look. He fights with himself for a while, but the urge becomes overwhelming. Kevin: I think I know where this is going. Michael: He finally gives in. He runs up to the bodies, forces his eyes open, and screams at them, "There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight!" Kevin: Oh man, that's 100% true. That's so human. It's why you can't look away from a car crash. It's why true crime podcasts and documentaries are a billion-dollar industry. You feel gross, but you're compelled to look at the terrible thing. Michael: Exactly. Sontag says this "tropism toward the gruesome" is a fundamental part of us. It’s not just morbid curiosity; it’s a deep, often shameful, attraction. And in our modern world, with a screen in our pocket, this impulse can be fed 24/7. We don't have to walk past an executioner; the images come right to us. Kevin: And that creates a different problem. It’s not a rare, shocking event anymore. It’s a constant stream. I see a horrific image from a war zone, I feel a pang of something—sympathy, horror—and then I scroll to the next thing, a cat video or an ad for a mattress. Michael: And that’s the trap of what Sontag calls compassion fatigue. She has this devastating line: "Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers." Kevin: But that's the core of the dilemma, isn't it? I see a photo of a child in a famine, I feel terrible, but what can I actually do? I'm not a doctor, I'm not a diplomat. I can donate five dollars, maybe, but that feels so small it's almost insulting. So the feeling has nowhere to go. It just… fades. And I'm left feeling guilty and helpless. Michael: And you get angry. You get angry at the image for making you feel helpless. You get angry at the media for showing it to you. Sontag says what we call "apathy" isn't an absence of feeling. It's often full of feelings: rage and frustration at our own impotence. Kevin: Yeah, that rings true. So you start to build a callus. You learn to just scroll past. You tell yourself it's because you're "desensitized," but maybe it's a defense mechanism against that feeling of powerlessness. Michael: It is. But Sontag pushes even further. She makes an argument that is so sharp and so uncomfortable about the very nature of sympathy itself. She says, "So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence." Kevin: Whoa. Say that again. Michael: Our sympathy proclaims our innocence. When we look at a picture of suffering and think, "Oh, that's so terrible, those poor people," what we're really doing, she suggests, is patting ourselves on the back. We're saying, "See? I'm a good person. I feel the right things. I'm not one of the bad guys who caused this." It’s an emotional transaction that costs us nothing and lets us off the hook. Kevin: That is a brutal take. Because it feels true. It’s a way of separating ourselves from the horror, drawing a line: "That is them, over there. This is me, over here, the compassionate observer." Michael: Exactly. It reinforces the distance. So if that kind of sympathy is a dead end, what's the alternative? Just become numb and cynical? Kevin: That's what I was going to ask. If feeling bad is just a self-serving illusion, what's the point of looking at all? Michael: And that feeling of guilt and impotence is exactly what Sontag wants us to question. She says maybe simple 'sympathy' is the wrong goal entirely.

Kevin: Okay, so if sympathy is a trap, and looking away is a form of moral failure, we're stuck. What does Sontag propose as the way out? Michael: She doesn't offer an easy answer, which is why some critics found the book frustrating. She doesn't give you a five-step plan to end war. What she offers is a harder, more profound task. She suggests we set aside that easy, self-congratulatory sympathy for a moment. Kevin: And replace it with what? Michael: With reflection. A specific kind of reflection. Instead of just feeling sympathy for them, we should reflect on how our own lives—our privileges, our comfort, the society we live in—might be located on the same map as their suffering. Kevin: What does that mean, "on the same map"? Michael: It means asking uncomfortable questions. How might the wealth of our nation be linked, even indirectly, to the poverty of another? How might the cheap goods we buy be connected to exploitative labor conditions elsewhere? How might the foreign policy our government enacts, which we tacitly support, contribute to the instability that leads to these wars? Kevin: So it’s about connecting the dots. Seeing it not as an isolated tragedy "over there," but as part of a global system that we are also a part of. Michael: Precisely. The images aren't an answer key. They can't be. Sontag says they are simply "an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers." The photograph's job isn't to make you feel good or bad. Its job is to make you think. Kevin: Wow. So the point isn't to 'fix' the world with a click or a donation, but to understand our own place in it. That's... a much heavier lift than just feeling sad for a moment. It’s a lifelong homework assignment. Michael: It is. And it reframes the whole act of looking. You're no longer a passive, innocent spectator. You're an implicated citizen trying to understand a complex reality. The pain of others isn't just a spectacle to be consumed. It's a reflection we're being asked to look into, to see what part of ourselves, and our world, is staring back. Kevin: That’s a powerful and deeply unsettling idea. It makes me think about the next time I scroll past a difficult image. The question isn't just "Do I care?" but "How am I connected?" Michael: Exactly. And Sontag leaves us with that. She doesn't absolve us of the discomfort. She tells us the discomfort is the point. A question for all of us is, when we see these images, do we have the courage to do that—to really think? Kevin: A lot to think about. This is Aibrary, signing off.