First Thoughts and Susan Sontag

My once clear understanding of the dignity that each human being holds, after one week at the Namakkal AIDS clinic and two months of travel throughout Northern India, if we use a metaphor of an apple on a tree, was ripe, has fallen, and is now rotting. No one picked it; it fell naturally, walking past the push-cart boys and their licorice legs. Yesterday, I remember praising myself after looking with indifference as the doctor pointed out what leprosy looks like on a woman’s arm, a woman already HIV positive and infected with vaginal warts.

I just finished reading a fascinating essay by Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” from her collection, On Photography. Sontag relates how two photographers, capturing essentially the same material receive very different public responses. The first photographer was Werner Bischof shooting Indian famine victims in the 1950’s. The second photographer was Don McCullin shooting the starving Biafrans as they fought for a short-lived independence from Nigeria in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The public reaction to Don McCullin’s work was considerably more subdued; there was less shock and fewer feelings of moral obligation than the reaction to Bischof’s work. Sontag attributes this lesser response to the way in which people can become “used to” atrocity. After Bischof’s work appeared, the novelty of seeing emaciated bodies from third-world countries was gone. To use Sontag’s word and Hannah Arendt’s word in her cataloguing of the Eichmann trial in reference to evil, atrocity, maybe like roses on Valentine’s Day, can become banal. Sontag writes, “After thirty years, a saturation point may have been reached. In these last decades, ‘concerned’ photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.”

As some of you may know, I have volunteered once before at an AIDS clinic in Nairobi, Kenya. The work there was less interactive. I was stationed primarily in the pharmacy. However, each weekend, I rode the buses with the doctors to poor, more rural regions of Kenya. For each child that the doctors said would die of a curable disease because of lack of money, I was shocked and outraged. Now I am at an AIDS clinic for the second time. Women, dying, who can’t come to take their anti-retroviral medicine because their pimps will fire them, and then who would feed their children? - this horror doesn’t penetrate as strongly. To complete Sontag’s analogy of the two photographers, I, having already experienced shock and outrage at the first clinic, hearing about the same atrocities for the second time doesn’t arouse the same feelings of injustice and anger. The primary and frightening difference between the example of the more subdued reaction of the general public in the 1970’s and my own subdued reaction now: these are people I’m dealing with, not photographs.