Numbing Effect of Disaster Photography According to Susan Sontag

DISASTER RESEARCH
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Disaster Research: Moral Dilemma in Disaster Photography
Photojournalism has significantly impacted the understanding of the world from its inception in 1839. It has allowed people to chronicle their changing environment and record its diversity. It has also helped individuals to grasp the science of emotion. As the world undergoes constant change, photography is employed to document it. Even if photography has gone from being a specialized hobby to being regarded as a valid artistic medium, the reality that modern visual culture is fundamentally different from that of the preceding century and a half is difficult to deny. Morality is examined more closely in photography than in any other artistic medium. The abundance of violent images worries society, as do subjects' permission to be photographed, modified images' potential to lead to damaging misunderstandings of fundamental problems, and photography's potential to diminish the ability to see the world as it truly is. Subsequently, there is a moral dilemma in the urge to both look at and stop when people respond to photographs of suffering. The concerns expressed by Susan Sontag in the late 1970s and early 1980s are still relevant today.
Even in the digital age, Susan Sontag's On Photography remains a seminal collection of essays that sheds insight on visual culture's psychology and social dynamics online. This insightful remark by Sontag has a lot of resonance in today's world. Sontag gives a framework for understanding why and how images have a tremendous hold on people. The human species continues to enjoy Plato's cave images of reality as it has for millennia. When people look around, they notice how many photos are clamoring for their attention. Almost all of the items in the inventory have been photographed at some point since the collection began in 1839. However, images lack the instructional significance of earlier, more artisanal photographs. The photographer's unquenchable thirst transforms the cave and, in turn, the entire world. The perceptions of what is worth seeing and what people have the right to see are altered and expanded by photographs teaching a new visual language that one may use to interact with one another. Additionally, they serve as a guide on how people ought to view the world. People can feel as though they are holding all of existence together with photography's ability to capture it in a single image.[Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador Modern Classics, 2017), 6.] [Tobi McEvenue, "Reading, seeing and hearing voices: What can autistic people teach social work?," 2021, 21,]
Given the social media photostream, there is the ultimate endeavor to organize, frame, and package lives for a display to others and even to individual selves. Sontag's insight is particularly topical at the moment. Photojournalism as an art form, according to Sontag, allows people to control their perceptions of the world and others' perceptions of their experiences. Therefore, the camera is the best tool for awareness when in an acquisitive mode. To imagine something is to claim it as an individual’s own. At its core, this strategy involves positioning yourself as the center of the universe and claiming some degree of authority over it. To Sontag, this purposeful manipulation of reality through idealized photographic images is more traumatic because of the violent self-framing on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Idealism is no less aggressive than plainness. There is an aggressive tone in the audience whenever a camera rises.[Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 246.] [Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 12]
Thirty years after Sontag first experienced this fury, social media violence of self-assertion is now being used to express it differently. For presentation, idealization, and currency in an economy of envy, this is a forced framing of the identity sexting and dancing are no longer the most popular forms of entertainment. Still, photography has become a form of mass art because most people who engage in it are not doing so as an artistic endeavor in the conventional sense. Photographic journalism, as predicted by Sontag, is now an instrument in the current power dynamics. To some extent, it serves as both a social ritual and a tool of political influence. As a result, she claims that photography has an inherent violent quality. Cameras are sold as predatory weapons that can fire at any time, similar to how cars are marketed. As a general rule, the general public expects technology to be simple and unobtrusive. Photo capturing requires no particular skills or expertise from the user, according to the manufacturers, and the machine itself is all-knowing and responsive to the slightest touch. The only thing you need to do to start a car is to turn the key or pull the trigger. The usage of cameras, like guns and automobiles, can become physiologically addictive.[Rekha Datta, "Globalized Arts: The Entertainment Economy and Cultural Identity," International Studies Review 14, no. 3 (2012): 456, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2486.2012.01139.x.] [Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 17]
On the other hand, photographs link local communities and people and nuclear power plants by dividing them along a power hierarchy. Susan Sontag calls each family's portrait chronicle a portable image kit that bears testament to its connectedness. As people build their online communities around photo streams and shared timelines, it is reasonable to wonder how much the social circle has superseded the family circle. According to Sontag, the tourism industry is making greater use of photography. Facebook and Twitter users have been consuming the lives of others on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which raises the question of whether individuals have become social med...