Regarding the Pain of Others

Blurb

Regarding the Pain of Others is a 2003 book by Susan Sontag, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was her last published book before her death in 2004. It is regarded by many to be a follow-up or addendum to On Photography, despite the fact that the two books have radically different opinions about photography. This long essay is especially interested in war photography. Using photography to back up her points, Sontag sets out to answer one of the three questions posed in Virginia Woolf's book Three Guineas, "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?"
While debunking a certain number of commonplaces concerning images of pain, horror, and atrocity, Regarding the Pain of Others both underscores their importance and undercuts hopes that they can communicate very much. On the one hand, narrative and framing confer upon images most of their meaning, and on the other, those who have not lived through such things "can't understand, can't imagine" the experiences such images represent.