Sunday Feature: Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others

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BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Regarding the Pain of Others

Allan Little addresses the gulf between the reality of war and our means to comprehend it.

BBC Correspondent Allan Little addresses the gulf between the reality of war and our ability to comprehend it from afar. He picks up on Susan Sontag's essay on war photography.

How do we communicate the horrors of war to a public saturated with bad news and gruesome digital images? For almost two centuries, photographers have attempted to capture the experience of conflict in stark pictures, scenes that aim to move us to action, to engage.

In her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag grappled with this question. War photographs, Sontag believed, confront us with our simultaneous need to look and to turn away. Yet for Sontag, most people could never understand what war is like. ‘We don’t get it’, she wrote.

Allan Little knew Sontag and here takes up the mantle. He has spent decades reporting in conflict zones from Bosnia to Sierra Leone. As a young reporter he believed, in his own words, in ‘the power of witness’. Now he’s not so sure. What purpose do war reports or images serve? Why do they seem to make little or no difference?

Allan talks to reporters and journalists who he's met during conflicts, especially in Bosnia. Janine di Giovanni, who has spent a lifetime committed to exposing the cruelties of war along with photographer Paul Lowe, now resident in Sarajevo. We also hear from Alixandra Fazzina about the care to make meaningful visual stories, avoiding stereotypes. Zaina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist, tells us what it feels like when the world doesn't listen. And we consider the contemporary power of Goya’s early-19th-century series The Disasters of War with historian Juliet Wilson-Bareau. 

Produced by David Barnes and Kate Bland
A Cast Iron Radio production for BBC Radio 3.

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