Regarding the Pain of Others

A widely-published and widely-awarded theorist and critic on a variety of topics, Susan Sontag was a writer, teacher, and filmmaker for over four decades before she wrote her final work, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). It comes more than two decades after her classic treatise, On Photography (1977), a monograph comprised of six essays that she chooses to reconsider in her last opus.

As the author of this nonfiction work on a timely topic (but a universal one, she would argue), Sontag packs her latest book with cases in point, many with detailed explanations, and she writes as if not to inform, but to interrogate. Sontag does trace and explicate war photography through history, examining its precursors in adjacent arts and its relation to journalism, but what makes Regarding the Pain of Others unique is Sontag’s insistence in asking “why” and “how.” Is it really true that perceiving realistic and shocking photographs from the front—any front—will elicit feelings of compassion for the victims and motivate change, or might such images inspire praise and patriotism? Can we take for granted that our postmodern image-saturation numbs the capacity for feeling, and for the thinking needed to re-assess our relations with those in faraway wars? As a character in her own prolonged query, Sontag builds a dialogue—with Virginia Woolf, with herself (her own already iterated theories), and with us.