Kitsch Magazine: Fall 2015

art by Jin Yoo
fascination at the sight of battered human bodies:
Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was going up from the
Piraeus along the outside of the North Wall when he
saw some corpses lying at the executioner’s feet. He had
an appetite to look at them but at the same time he was
disgusted and turned away. For a time he struggled with
himself and covered his face, but, finally overpowered by
the appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed
towards the corpses, saying, “Look for yourselves, you
evil wretches, take your fill of the beautiful sight[!]”
Certainly there’s something that provokes—invites—
us to look, some sense of mystery or discovery of a scene never
before seen. The first time I had heard of Ernst Friedrich’s Kreig
dem Kreige! (War Against War!), while reading Susan Sontag’s
Regarding the Pain of Others, I knew that I had to see at least a few
of the photographs from the book for myself. This is an album
of photographs compiled from German military and medical
archives that depicts the visual story of the First World War, or
as Sontag puts it, “an excruciating photo-tour of four years of
ruin, slaughter, and degradation.” I believe I could only glance
at about five photographs, and I only looked at one from the
“Face of War” section, which shows close-ups of soldiers’ facial
wounds. I know not what instrument of war, what poison could
have caused skin and tissue to form like that on a wounded
young man’s face. I stopped my little investigation after that.
There is something voyeuristic and invasive about
passively viewing photographs of this type. In her essay “In
Plato’s Cave,” Sontag claims that “to photograph people is to
violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves,
by having knowledge of them they can never have,” which
implies that taking a photograph transfers power to the
photographer. The subject overwhelmed by war, illness, or
economic oppression, opens up, either reluctantly or eagerly,
to the power of the camera, as if to say, “This is my story, and
if someone doesn’t tell it then no one will ever hear it.” As
viewers, in order to prevent baseless voyeurism, we must
have a heightened sensitivity to the context surrounding the
photographer’s decision to capture the subject and the realities
of the circumstance thrown upon them, and a will to help ease
the suffering—or at least a will to break the boundaries that
prevent us from easing the suffering.
Francisco Goya, the nineteenth century Spanish
artist most popularly known for his painting The Third of May,
created a series of etchings called The Disasters of War, which
documented the atrocities committed by both the French
and the Spanish during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The
inscriptions he adds to each etching is what truly makes the
collection eye-opening, anti-heroic, and modern; this series
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