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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day after day by television cameras, introduced the home front to a new intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since, battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment. Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.
It was not possible to publish a direct translation of the French article that appears in Diogëne 201. That article drew on an earlier discussion by Sontag of ideas she subsequently developed and published in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2003) and in an article in The New Yorker (‘Looking at War: Photography‘s View of Devastation and Death’, December 2002). We present here some extracts from the latter work.
