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The great critic shaped our understanding of the camera’s position in culture, which she continued to sharpen in her last days following the Iraq war
In 2004, as Susan Sontag lay dying, horrifying pictures began to emerge from a prison in Iraq.
She had received a diagnosis of blood cancer at the end of March that year, at the age of 71. Having had cancer twice before, she knew the suffering the disease, treated or untreated, would entail. And as she hesitated over what course to take, she, like much of the world, was looking at the pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib. This had been one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious prisons, and was now in US hands. The pictures showed soldiers torturing Iraqis: chaining them to walls; forcing them to stand in painful and humiliating positions; piling them, naked, into human pyramids. Continue reading...