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HAPPIER THAN EVER (SERIES)

Beatriz Montes Lozano

Created 2020

This artwork is based on Susan Sontag's essay "Regarding the pain in others".

There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards.