“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Condoleezza Rice, then President George W Bush’s national security adviser. Among metaphor’s sinister powers was its ability to twist language in the service of evil causes. If that sounded abstract, Sontag would show how the abuse of language could break people’s bodies. Aristotle wrote that metaphor “consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else”. Throughout her career, she had shown the dangers of separating things from their proper names. Was it appropriate to take pictures of other people’s suffering? And when such images appeared, was it more grotesque to look –or to look away?Īnd so Sontag went to work on what became her final published essay, Regarding the Torture of Others. From then on, in book after book, she tried to understand how images, especially images of suffering and war, reflected reality – and how they falsified or commodified it.
The moment, she said, split her life in two. When she was 12, in a bookstore in California, she came across pictures of the Holocaust. They also went back to the beginning of Sontag’s own life. ‘There is aggression implicit in every use of the camera’ … a hooded and wired Iraqi prisoner in the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.
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