Berger Vs. Sontag

Berger vs. Sontag

When you were little, did you actually read the books or did you just look at the pictures? Pictures are always eye-catching and have always been easier to glance at instead of reading all the words on the page. You see pictures everywhere you go in newspapers, books, and magazines. Pictures can say a thousand words if you let them. Someone could tell you a story just by looking at a picture. "Hiroshima" by John Berger "and "Regarding the Pain of Others" by Susan Sontag are two essays that would disagree on this idea. Berger, like many people, thought that pictures during the war should be shown to others to help them understand the hardship others had to go through and the seriousness of the war. Susan Sontag thought differently though. She felt that graphic pictures should not be shown and they should be banned. They are very contradictory to one another's opinion. Both were eye-opening essays and they were diametrically opposed to one another's beliefs and ideas.

Berger's story "Hiroshima" was about a man who came across a book that tells stories about real people and their thoughts and experiences during the Hiroshima bombing. The book he came upon consists of drawings and paintings made by the people who were in Hiroshima on the day of the bombing. The pictures were drawn by ordinary people, and most of the paintings were so simple, but they

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all made an impact on others and showed them how terrible their experiences were. The pictures were gruesome, but they made their point. In the reading it just goes on and talks about how important it is to show others about these pictures and let people really see how others saw it. Berger argues that pictures should be shown and should be shown the way they were originally. Pictures can always be photo shopped, but they always show the truth in a situation. It shows viewers what the events were like. Burger thought people need to see the actual pictures the survivors drew to see the truth of the events that occurred that day. These essays are real and Berger feels as if they need to be told and the pictures they drew need to be shown. In the book Berger says, " The face of the horror, the reaction which has now been mostly surprised, forces us to comprehend the reality of what happened"(320). He is trying to show us that pictures the victims of the bombing drew, need to be viewed to show the realness of what occurred that day. Berger also preached,

The memory of these events should be continually before our eyes. This is why the thousand of citizens of Hiroshima started to draw on their little scraps of paper. We need to show their drawing everywhere. These terrible images can now release an every of opposing the evil and for the lifelong struggle of that opposition. (320)