2004 Infinity Award: Writing

Acclaimed author and cultural critic Susan Sontag was born in New York City in 1933. She studied at Harvard and the University of Paris and taught at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University before beginning her career as a novelist and essayist in the 1960s. Sontag published her first novel, The Benefactor, in 1963 at the age of 30, and soon after began writing influential essays about art. On Photography, a collection of essays published in 1977, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and remains one of the most important critical documents related to the medium.

In 2003, Sontag took up many of the issues first discussed in On Photography from a fresh perspective with Regarding the Pain of Others, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. In context of recent incidents of violence, including the war in Bosnia and 9/11, Sontag writes about how photographs function to describe suffering and the ways people are affected by seeing them. She argues that an individual’s exposure to images of pain does not necessarily result in that individual becoming desensitized, but that it may have other effects, both positive and negative, on the person as well as the culture at large. Regarding the Pain of Others is an insightful examination of a major issue in photojournalism, and a valuable contribution to an ongoing discussion.