Regarding the Pain of Others

Every photograph of a suffering person is an invitation and a problem. It invites us to respond — to feel something, to do something. And it presents us with a problem we tend to avoid: what does looking actually accomplish? Does it help, or does it provide a substitute for helping? Does the proliferation of war photography make us more responsive to suffering, or does it anaesthetise us to it?

In her final book, written in the last year of her life, Susan Sontag returned to the questions she had raised thirty years earlier in On Photography and subjected them to the most honest scrutiny she could manage. Her earlier conclusion — that images numb us — she now complicated and partially reversed. Images do matter, she argued. But the work of responding to them cannot be delegated to the images themselves. That work is ours.

Brief, precise, and written with the authority of a lifetime of serious thinking about visual culture, Regarding the Pain of Others is one of the essential books about photography, journalism, and the ethics of representation in the modern world. Published by Penguin.