The Pain of Others and Strange Beauty
'Realness' and Photomontage
The first thing that struck me is the contradiction of trying to be 'real'/authentic' in photojournalism and the use of photographic montage in Dadaism, which is deliberate to be unreal. It is interesting that how war photographs are only 'real' (Sontag, 2003: 21), or 'seem utterly real' (Lippmann, 1922 in Sontag, 2003: 25) when they are taken in other places (voyeur distant sufferings, see also Chouliaraki (2008) "The Mediation of suffering and the vision of a cosmopolitan public "), then they become 'surreal' when it actually happens in real life. In this sense, it seems there is a clear line between self and other, which also resonates the point that memory is mostly local (Sontag, 2003: 35). This is kind of different from the estrangement of Dadaism (Orgad, 2012), especially the photomontage, which 'combines the familiar with the unusual' and 'the Self with the Other' (Makholm, 1997: 22). While photojournalism wants to be 'real', photographic montage de-familiarises it and invites people to challenge the common sense in their own context. It makes me think about the freedom of interpretation as a viewer of the news' images (which speaks back to Ways of Seeing to some extent), especially in the national context with my local memory. Are we able to de-familiarise our common knowledge and combine self with the others? Will the internet and social media* be helpful?
Commercial aspect and shocking images
On the other hand, both texts discuss the commercial aspects of the images. Sontag (2003) discusses it explicitly with a reference t the guideline: "if it bleeds, it leads" (p. 18). It is very much in line with the "Bad news is good news" in journalism as bad news sells better (more readers, more advertisers). To grab people's attention, the photographs need to be shocking (ibid., p. 23). Regarding the shockingness, Hannah Höch/the Dadaism works in a similar fashion. As their styles are meant to defamiliarise and challenge the traditional or 'known' arts, their images are likely to be shocking during that period.
*It may not be directly relevant, but I find this news quite interesting. It is about a man pretended to be a war photographer and have posted many photos on Instagram, and some well-known media outlets (e.g. Wall Street Journal, Vice and BBC Brazil) were fooled. (Schmidt, S., 2017).
