article summaries

Regarding the Torture of Others by Susan Sontag
Sontag’s article is dealing with imagery of the war. She rests solely on the power of words in the world, where "our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities". The article shows the demeanor on how the photographs reveal numerous political issues that are about both their degenerative nature as well as their possible benefit in creating a demand for social change.

The Falling Man by Tom Junod
What stuck out in my mind most when reading this article is the quote that reads “they exploited a man's death, stripped him of his dignity, invaded his privacy, turned tragedy into leering pornography. Most letters of complaint stated the obvious: that someone seeing the picture had to know who it was.” I don’t think that is what this photograph is. The identity of the man is not what comes to mind first when reading this article, but how he is a representation of what happened on 9/11. Something else that caught my attention most when reading this is how this photograph is deceiving. The falling man looks as if he is falling gracefully, straight down, when in reality, he is plummeting, out of control.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real by Slavoj Zizek
In this essay, Zizek provides his interpretation on the cultural and ideological insinuations of the terrorist attacks on the United States that took place on September 11, 2001. He compares what the American fantasy would be to different films like The Matrix, or The Truman Show, because these are movies about people living in a world they think is real but truly is not. He explains that “desert of the real” is the awareness that we live in a bubble-like reproduction of the world that creates the idea that an evil force is “threatening us all the time with total destruction”.