The New Yorker:

From 2002: Photography shapes our understanding of violent conflict—for better and for worse.

By Susan Sontag

In June, 1938, Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Written during the preceding two years, while she and most of her intimates and fellow-writers were rapt by the advancing Fascist insurrection in Spain, the book was couched as a tardy reply to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London who had asked, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For though they belong to the same class, “the educated class,” a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men make war. Men (most men) like war, or at least they find “some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting” that women (most women) do not seek or find. What does an educated—that is, privileged, well-off—woman like her know of war? Can her reactions to its horrors be like his?

Woolf proposes they test this “difficulty of communication” by looking at some images of war that the beleaguered Spanish government has been sending out twice a week to sympathizers abroad. Let’s see “whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things,” she writes. “This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room.” One can’t always make out the subject, so thorough is the ruin of flesh and stone that the photographs depict.

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