Draw Your Weapons

“Images that show suffering seem to bring the pictured people near...You are a good person. You feel. You grieve. You are sympathetic. You have done your part. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence, Sontag wrote. It lets us off the hook: So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering....Set sympathy aside, she wrote. Admit, instead, how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering.“

I happened to be reading this book while my government was putting children in cages at the border and images of their plight were being shared by everyone, everywhere. Sarah Sentilles has created a work of non-fiction that weaves together the worlds of war and art and showcases them in a way that highlight how similar they are. As the viewers of war and of art, we are as responsible for the images we use as the people and conflicts which created them. This is a singular work, hard to describe and very difficult to forget.