Episode #177 - Susan Sontag - Do you speak the language of pictures and videos?
Susan Sontag - Do you speak the language of pictures and videos?
This episode opens with Susan Sontag’s early encounter with Holocaust photographs—an experience she described as a turning point in her life. From there, it explores her argument that modern people have a complicated and often uncritical relationship with images. Sontag urges us to recognize how photographs and videos can both reveal and distort reality, shaping emotion, memory, and even moral response. She challenges the idea that simply seeing images is equivalent to understanding or action, warning instead of a culture trapped in passive consumption and nostalgia.
Further Reading:
The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial by David Lipsky (2023)
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (2019)
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein (2014)
See the full transcript here.
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