I found both of the readings for class today to be extremely powerful. After Barthes’ reading I became aware of the power of photography and how photographs can touch individuals on multiple different levels. Although photos merely represent something that happened in the past, it is clear that they can still heavily influence their observants. This was brought to light in both Sontag and Azoulay’s pieces for today. Both women bring to light the pain and suffering photographs uncover when depicting images of war. These photos are simply documenting the slaughter that occurs, and as Azoulay states, they “restore the atrocity” (Azoulay). Azoulay engages with the viewer and states that the spectator becomes involved with recreating the disaster that these war images are displaying. Sontag and Azoulay make claims that photographs of war can be just as criminal as war itself, because of the power that these images carry.
From these pieces I came to the understanding that war photographs force us to relive what was happening at the time. Sontag states that “people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the most outrageous insanity of war.” (Sontag 7) It is through photographs that these horrors are made vivid. These pieces are also in conversation with Barthes claim that photography is death, because war photographs display the deep pain and suffering that occurs during a time of war.
When reading both of these pieces I immediately thought of World War II and the Holocaust specifically. When I think of war images, I think of men and women in concentration camps staring blankly into the camera behind a barbed wire fence. I then thought of the power of war time photos and how they are used heavily as propaganda. Although photos can make people relive the horror of war, I believe that they can also urge people to create horrors as well, just as some of these photos did in Europe during World War II.