Book: Regarding the Pain of Others

Overview
Susan Sontag’s 2003 book interrogates what images of atrocity do to those who look at them and how they circulate as instruments of memory, propaganda, and conscience. Framed as a response to Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, it questions whether photographs of suffering can make people oppose war, and it resists any easy, universal “we” who looks. The book revises some of Sontag’s earlier skepticism in On Photography, acknowledging both the vitality and the limits of photographs as testimony. It asks how images teach, mislead, mobilize, or anesthetize, and insists that their effects depend on context, use, and the viewer’s history.

A lineage of seeing war
Sontag places modern photojournalism in a longer tradition of representing violence, beginning with Goya’s Disasters of War and moving through Roger Fenton’s Crimean War tableaux, Matthew Brady’s Civil War images, and the contested truth claims of Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier.” She highlights how censorship shaped World War I imagery and how Vietnam-era photographs, the Saigon execution, the napalm-burned girl, seemed to galvanize public opinion. She also considers images from the Balkan wars, Rwanda, and the attacks of September 11, 2001, tracing how different publics read the same pictures differently and how states and media organizations regulate what viewers may see.

Shock, knowledge, and the need for context
Photographs can shock and sear the mind, but shock is not knowledge. A single image freezes a moment, strips away sequence, cause, and motive, and cannot by itself explain a conflict or assign responsibility. Captions, accounts, and historical framing are indispensable. Photographs are evidence, but partial and susceptible to staging, cropping, and tendentious presentation. Their potency lies as much in the narratives that accompany them as in their visual force. They invite viewers to imagine a world beyond the frame, yet that imaginative leap can be steered toward compassion or toward vengeance.

The ethics of looking
Sontag probes the asymmetry between those who suffer and those who watch, especially when spectators are safe and far from the events depicted. She asks who has the right to look at the dead, whether it is permissible to show mutilated bodies, and how to weigh the dignity of subjects against the public’s claim to know. She cautions against the pornographic analogy often attached to atrocity images, noting that the desire to look is not inherently base, but she scrutinizes how beauty and composition risk aestheticizing pain. The picture’s formal grace does not nullify its moral content, yet eloquence can make horror seem artful and thus less unbearable.

Compassion, fatigue, and distance
Against the cliché of desensitization, Sontag argues that saturation in images does not inevitably dull feeling. People may turn away, but not because images cannot move them; rather, because feeling is volatile and must be sustained by thought and action. The recurrent complaint that images are too close or too distant masks a deeper discomfort: there is no correct distance from other people’s pain. The problem is not only whether one feels, but what feeling is for. She stresses the pluralization of audiences, different communities bring distinct histories and investments, and dismantles the presumptive “we” that would claim a single moral response.

Use, memory, and political work
Photographs can mobilize pity, solidarity, or hatred, and can be exploited by any side. They can dignify victims by bearing witness, and they can brutalize by turning suffering into a spectacle. Their ethical value is inseparable from how they are used: curated with context, paired with testimony, embedded in sustained memory rather than passing sensation. Sontag defends the necessity of looking yet refuses to equate looking with understanding or obligation fulfilled. The book sustains an austere hope: that images, while not instruction manuals for action, can anchor memory and prick conscience, provided we resist amnesia and examine the stories that images serve. No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.