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 str...