Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century… - Susan Sontag

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one — or both. Usually both.

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.