Regarding the Pain of Others Read Online Free Page A

leaning out the bedroom window of her rent-controlled Village apartment with her point-and-shoot, had caught the north tower as it fell. “A Democracy of Photographs,” the subtitle of the exhibit, suggested that there was work by amateurs as good as the work of the seasoned professionals who participated. And indeed there was—which proves something about photography, if not necessarily something about cultural democracy. Photography is the only major art in which professional training and years of experience do not confer an insuperable advantage over the untrained and inexperienced—this for many reasons, among them the large role that chance (or luck) plays in the taking of pictures, and the bias toward the spontaneous, the rough, the imperfect. (There is no comparable level playing field in literature, where virtually nothing owes to chance or luck and where refinement of language usually incurs no penalty; or in the performing arts, where genuine achievement is unattainable without exhaustive training and daily practice; or in film-making, which is not guided to any significant degree by the anti-art prejudices of much of contemporary art photography.)
    Whether the photograph is understood as a naïve object or the work of an experienced artificer, its meaning—and the viewer’s response—depends on how the picture is identified or misidentified; that is, on words. The organizing idea, the moment, the place, and the devoted public made this exhibit something of an exception. The crowds of solemn New Yorkers who stood in line for hours on Prince Street every day throughout the fall of 2001 to see Here Is New York had no need of captions. They had, if anything, a surfeit of understanding of what they were looking at, building by building, street by street—the fires, the detritus, the fear, the exhaustion, the grief. But one day captions will be needed, of course. And the misreadings and the misrememberings, and new ideological uses for the pictures, will make their difference.
    Normally, if there is any distance from the subject, what a photograph “says” can be read in several ways. Eventually, one reads into the photograph what it should be saying. Splice into a long take of a perfectly deadpan face the shots of such disparate material as a bowl of steaming soup, a woman in a coffin, a child playing with a toy bear, and the viewers—as the first theorist of film, Lev Kuleshov, famously demonstrated in his workshop in Moscow in the 1920s—will marvel at the subtlety and range of the actor’s expressions. In the case of still photographs, we use what we know of the drama of which the picture’s subject is a part. “Land Distribution Meeting, Extremadura, Spain, 1936,” the much-reproduced photograph by David Seymour (“Chim”) of a gaunt woman standing with a baby at her breast looking upward (intently? apprehensively?), is often recalled as showing someone fearfully scanning the sky for attacking planes. The expressions on her face and the faces around her seem charged with apprehensiveness. Memory has altered the image, according to memory’s needs, conferring emblematic status on Chim’s picture not for what it is described as showing (an outdoor political meeting, which took place four months before the war started) but for what was soon to happen in Spain that would have such enormous resonance: air attacks on cities and villages, for the sole purpose of destroying them completely, being used as a weapon of war for the first time in Europe. 2 Before long the sky did harbor planes that were dropping bombs on landless peasants like those in the photograph. (Look again at the nursing mother, at her furrowed brow, her squint, her half-open mouth. Does she still seem as apprehensive? Doesn’t it now seem as if she is squinting because the sun is in her eyes?)
    The photographs Woolf received are treated as a window on the war: transparent views of their subject. It was of no interest to her that each