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I’ve always thought that one of the things it would be fairly reasonable to have written on my headstone would be, “He often missed the obvious��. I was saying to people at work the other day that there was a part of this book where I thought, “god, how did I get to be 50 and never think of this before?�� It was the bit where she talks about the holocaust and holocaust museums and then questions why America doesn’t have a museum to the victims of slavery �� you know, those victims are still walking about amongst us to the extent that black American disadvantage is a continuing manifestation of that history and the subsequent imposed ways of thinking caused by that history. Why is there no real museum dedicated to the holocaust that occurred to the Australian Aboriginals? We have a holocaust museum here in Melbourne too. Her discussion of the nature of ‘remembering�� is probably worth the effort in reading the book.

Not that this book requires much effort �� if there is one thing you can say for Sontag it is that she is a remarkably clear writer and thinker.

In many ways this book is Sontag coming back to themes she discusses in On Photography and not always coming to the same conclusions. There is a really nice part of the book where she discusses drawings of the sufferings of war done by Goya where he writes under them captions that say things like, “Look, this actually happened, I'm not making this up.�� The point being, in part, that we don’t expect to need to say things like that under a photograph. We might question whether it is a truly representative photograph, but we generally don’t question whether it is true. We still expect today that what we see photographed is a manifestation of the light that struck the lens. She talks about the faking of photographs, particularly war photographs �� rearranging bodies or the staging of events after the event to make it look more like we think it ‘ought�� to have looked �� but even then, even as a staged event, we still think of photography as telling a kind of truth even if it is one that needs to be explained and qualified.

Over the last month or so there has been an exhibition at the State Library of Victoria called Rome: Piranesi's vision. Piranesi did scenes of Rome and also visions of Ancient Rome �� reconstructions in the shape of maps as well as imaginative drawings. And over the last month or so I’ve attended a couple of lectures on his images. Now, I’d always just thought that if someone was going to do views of a city that, you know, they would sit down somewhere and draw what they saw in front of them. I can be naive like that. But actually, what Piranesi did was to ‘improve�� Rome. Not just making buildings look better �� but shifting them so that they would be next to other buildings and in also not being too concerned if he missed a couple of windows here or some doors there. He was going for pretty, rather than accuracy. I was so surprised at this, it is hard to say. I had always just assumed that these drawings would be ‘accurate�� �� photograph accurate. I also thought the maps, even maps of places that didn't exist anymore, would also strive for a kind of accuracy too, but these spent more time trying to be pretty too, despite knowingly ignoring stuff. Often photographs, particularly war photographs, need to be approached in much the same way that Piranesi’s visions of Rome need to be approached.

We look at images of the holocaust and a large part of the point of that is ‘to remember�� �� except, the holocaust occurred before most of us were born �� so the verb, ‘to remember�� probably isn’t quite the right one. Rather, the point of looking at these images isn’t to remember, but to learn and understand with the hope that we learn that this should never happen again. Except, it does happen again. If there is one thing that the photographic archive of the 20th century proves time and again it is that people are all too able to commit the most god-awful atrocities, often with a kind of gleeful abandon. I can’t remember who said it, possibly Zizek, that America is the oddest place, atrocity after atrocity occurs there (think of school shootings) and somehow after each new atrocity people can still say, in all seriousness, that the country has just ‘lost its innocence��. We need to get over this idea that we can still be ‘innocent�� �� this is one of the things that Sontag says we can learn from looking at images of past atrocities.

I think this is a particularly important book to read this year, preferably before August. Soon we are going to go through an endless reliving of World War One. And you know that we humans much prefer the romance of war to its horrors. That we even make the horrors seems somehow romantic. Before you get swept away with how much fun war is, perhaps learning to think about the moral and ethical questions that lie at the heart of looking at images of the pain of others is a useful exercise. For that reason this book is a useful place to start.