Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems too “aesthetic”; that is, too much like art. The dual powers of photography — to generate documents and to create works of visual art — have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photography ought or ought not to do. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize. In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture’s status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it exclaims, What a spectacle!
. . .
So far as photographs with the most solemn or heartrending subject matter are art — and this is what they become when they hang on walls, whatever the disclaimers — they partake of the fate of all wall-hung or floor-supported art displayed in public spaces. That is, they are stations along a — usually accompanied — stroll. . . . Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. Eventually, the specificity of the photographs’ accusations will fade; the denunciation of a particular conflict and attribution of specific crimes will become a denunciation of human cruelty, human savagery as such. The photographer’s intentions are irrelevant to this larger process.
Sontag, S., 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others, 1st. Ed., New York, NY: Picador.
