Photography of war began around the middle of the nineteenth century, with images from the Crimean War and the American Civil War. For the first time, photographs of wounded soldiers and ruined cities appeared not on battlefields themselves, but on the walls of homes and in the pages of newspapers. Photography transformed war from a local and limited experience into a visual phenomenon accessible to all. From that moment on, violence was no longer something narrated solely by soldiers or direct witnesses; it became something the masses could confront through images. It is here that the ethical question of looking at the suffering of others emerges. Does seeing these images make us more responsible and more inclined toward peace? Or, on the contrary, does it turn war into a spectacle to be consumed?
Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others is an essay on war photography and its power to affect viewers through images of suffering, violence, and the inhumanity of war.
To open this question, Sontag deliberately turns to another text: Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf. In Three Guineas, Woolf, in the form of an imagined letter to an educated man, reflects on how another war might be prevented. In doing so, she looks at photographs from the Spanish Civil War and asks herself: what do these images do to us? Do they merely horrify us, or can they also become grounds for moral judgment and political action?
Sontag begins her argument precisely from this point: from Woolf’s doubt regarding the possibility of “learning” from images of war, and from her skepticism that simply witnessing the suffering of others could transform warmongers or even complicit intellectuals. Woolf writes:
“This morning’s collection contains a photograph of the body of a man or woman so mutilated that it might be the carcass of a pig. But in truth these are the bodies of children, and that place is part of a house whose corner has been blown away by a bomb, while a birdcage still hangs from the ceiling — a remnant of what was once a sitting room…”
For Sontag, Woolf represents a writer who understood earlier than many others that images of war can both call us to action and lead us toward a kind of paralyzing, futile spectatorship. By rereading these same pages of Three Guineas, Sontag demonstrates that the essential issue is not merely whether war photographs are “real,” but rather the manner in which we see them, the political context surrounding them, and the relationship between the viewer, power, and violence. This remains central throughout her critique of war photography and the contemporary consumption of images of suffering:
“If these photographs do not disturb you, if you do not turn away from them and attempt to put an end to this savagery, then, Woolf suggests, you possess something monstrous in your character. She also reminds us that we are not monsters; we belong to the educated class.”
In her book, Sontag asks whether repeated exposure to images of violence and cruelty eventually desensitizes people. She examines human brutality across different historical periods and places — from the American Civil War and the torture and lynching of Black Americans in the southern United States, to the The Holocaust, the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia, and the massacres in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Palestine. Through these examples, she reshapes our assumptions about the uses and meanings of war imagery in the modern world.
As Sontag writes:
“In a world saturated — no, flooded — with images, the authority of important photographs gradually diminishes. We become callous and thick-skinned, and in the end little room remains for pity or the prick of conscience.”
In fact, Sontag’s book is both an expansion and a revision of the arguments she made earlier in On Photography. There she wrote:
“What determines the possibility of photographs having moral impact is the existence of a relevant political consciousness. Without politics, historical photographs are often experienced as something unreal, or as emotional shocks that ultimately discourage action.”
In On Photography, Sontag approaches photographs with suspicion. In her view, there is no guarantee that viewing images will lead to political action, even when their content shocks or horrifies the viewer. In Regarding the Pain of Others, however, this suspicion toward photography’s soothing or anesthetizing role gives way to a more complex perspective. Here Sontag acknowledges an educational function for photographs in shaping public consciousness. She argues that photography, through visual representations of atrocities such as the lynching of Black Americans, “overshadows other ways of understanding and remembering.” In this sense, photographs can ultimately become what she calls “good objects.”
Cruelty lies at the deepest layer of Sontag’s book. The word “cruel” was once used by the Victorian art critic John Ruskin to describe painters who portrayed poor peasants in an aesthetically pleasing or “picturesque” manner. But why cruel? Because the artist, by framing suffering within the accepted aesthetics of the age, effectively denies any profound emotional response that might lead to reform or action. Cruelty, then, is the inability to empathize with the suffering of others. In modernity, it becomes bound up with the collapse of distance in space and time through visual technologies.
For Sontag, such images contain an ambiguity that can either move viewers toward action or drive them away from it. She offers many examples — from powerful visual depictions of the Gulf War to images of violence in the Balkans during the 1990s:
“The images of atrocities in Bosnia… became important in strengthening opposition to a war that was by no means inevitable or insoluble and could have been stopped much earlier. Thus one could feel obliged to look at these photographs, terrible as they were, because something could still be done about what they depicted.”
At the time Sontag was writing, the Gulf War had recently taken place, and the wars in the Balkans remained vivid in public memory. About the Gulf War images, she writes:
“What the American military promoted during the Gulf War (1991) was technological warfare: skies above corpses filled with the trails of missiles and shells. These images undoubtedly demonstrated America’s total military superiority over its enemy… Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, fleeing Kuwait northward toward Basra — on foot or in armored vehicles — were slaughtered by aerial bombardments using explosives, napalm, radioactive depleted uranium dust, and cluster bombs. One American officer shamelessly referred to this massacre as a ‘turkey shoot.’”
Therefore, the publication of such images could be read as a direct sign of a specific political and military conflict — something that intensified the imperative to act. But what happens when the images in question evoke catastrophes that have been erased from collective memory, and whose perpetrators have long since died?
Sontag writes: “To encounter a collection of photographs of lynched Black people in small-town America between the 1890s and the 1930s at an exhibition in New York in 2000 was for thousands of viewers a shocking and revelatory experience.” (p. 91)
The temporal distance between those horrifying events and the moment of viewing them as photographic images makes action so problematic that Sontag herself struggles to identify the guilty party: “Whom do we want to blame? More exactly, whom do we think we have the right to blame?” One could say that the “historicity” of the image — its value as an object that has entered historical heritage — neutralizes the original context in which the photographs were taken and dilutes the viewer’s response into a generalized sympathy for the “human condition.” These images become part of a public archive in which voyeuristic displays of violence and cruelty merely reinforce the desires and fetishes circulating within the image economies of the postindustrial age. Sontag continually oscillates between these two conceptions of photography: on the one hand, as a call to action, and on the other, as part of a pessimistic culture of images detached by the media from the conflicts themselves and from their causes.
In the final section of the book, Sontag critiques the view advanced by French philosophers such as Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard: namely, that reality is actively constructed through a mediated culture of spectacle. (Elsewhere in the book there are also signs of a rivalry between Anglo-American philosophy and Continental thought.) She reproaches these thinkers for seeming to “dare to suggest that there is no real suffering in the world” (p. 110), and in response reasserts her own more conservative position — first articulated in On Photography — a position grounded in the existence of a reality independent of images: “This argument is really a defense of reality and of the standards for responding more fully to it, which are in jeopardy.” (p. 109)
The clarity of Sontag’s argument against the French philosophers, and the apparent self-evidence of her claims about an independent reality threatened by fabricated images, reflect the deep divide separating American empiricism from European critical rationality in the humanities. The arguments of Debord and Baudrillard amount to a critical intervention into the ontological status of the photographic image as a cultural commodity and into its power to shape the conditions of subjective consciousness. Human “being” within the visual formations of photography is framed and constructed in such a way that the past, as a meaningful event, emerges only through the visual archive through which alone it can be accessed. But for Sontag, human existence is naturally bound to the past; photographs are, at best, aids to memory, and at worst deceptive or seductive representations that lead to cultural forgetting.
Sontag wants photographs to compel us to remember an event as something that truly happened to someone who truly suffered: “Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself.” (p. 115) To overcome cruelty, remembering must itself become an ethical responsibility:
“Cruelty and forgetting seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering over the much longer span of collective history. Simply put, there is too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”
Although remembering is, in itself, positive, one cannot allow memory to persist excessively, since doing so would make those who feel wronged “vindictive.” The question then becomes: where exactly does Sontag stand regarding photographs? Are they an affirmative and decisive force for political action, or seductive images surrendered to voyeuristic spectatorship and the consumption of spectacle? It seems Sontag could never fully decide. Unlike John Ruskin, whose belief in a natural and ideal order structured all of his arguments, Sontag, as a humanist, could not rely on such a foundation. She was therefore driven toward a relativistic account of the mediating processes of images, which ultimately led her to acknowledge a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of photography itself. Modern images are cruel — there is no doubt about that — yet there is no longer any way to restore the integrity of the human spirit or prevent its collapse. This may explain the hesitations, digressions, and uncertainties scattered throughout Sontag’s book: a refusal to offer a definitive solution or adopt a clear line of action.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag both defends the “power” of war photography and critiques the moral illusions and simplifications surrounding such images. In her view, images of war are never transparent or neutral. In On Photography, she reminds us that the history of war photography has, from the very beginning, been intertwined with censorship and staging. She points, for example, to the photographs of Roger Fenton during the Crimean War — a photographer sent by the British government to produce “acceptable” images of war without showing corpses or the true horror of battle.
In 1855, Fenton was commissioned as one of the first war photographers to document scenes from the Crimean War for the British government. Despite the dangers of cholera and the risk to his own life, he produced more than 350 photographs of soldiers, artillery, and battlefields in order to manage British public opinion through “realistic,” though often softened, imagery. According to Sontag, Fenton’s photographs focused not on horror and death but on dignified portraits and static landscapes; because of both technical limitations and the commissioned nature of the project, they presented an idealized, bloodless vision of war far removed from its brutal reality.
For Sontag, even when a war photograph appears to document reality, the choice of angle, the exclusion of certain elements, and the propagandistic use of the image can completely alter its meaning. She fiercely opposes the assumption that “seeing horrifying images of war automatically makes us peace-loving or moral.” In Regarding the Pain of Others, she asks: if photographs truly possess such power, why has war not ceased after so many horrific images? Sontag argues that photographs may stir emotions, but there is no guarantee these emotions will develop into sustained political action; they may simply produce a momentary shock and then quickly fade into forgetfulness.
Sontag also warns about the “commodification” of images of suffering. In the age of mass media, horrifying images constantly appear and disappear across screens: we look at photographs of corpses and destruction while eating breakfast, and the same cycle repeats the next day. The result, rather than deepened empathy, may be habituation and numbness — the suffering of others becoming part of the visual background of everyday life.
And yet Sontag does not reject images of war. On the one hand, she insists that seeing the suffering of others is necessary, and that anyone entirely unaffected by such images has an ethical problem. But she also stresses that “seeing” alone is insufficient; we must think about what we are seeing — how the photograph was taken, what it reveals, what it conceals, and what relationship exists between our comfort and the suffering of those depicted. In other words, rather than relying on the automatic force of shock, she advocates for a critical and responsible gaze that treats the image as an occasion for reflection and for questioning structures of power, rather than merely as a trigger for fleeting emotion.
According to Sontag, the media guide public sentiment through images. She writes: “As long as there are photographs, war appears ‘real.’ The antiwar movement during Vietnam was fueled by these images. It was journalists who ignited public pressure that something had to be done about the war in Bosnia — what is sometimes called the ‘CNN effect’: images of besieged Sarajevo appearing nightly in the living rooms of hundreds of millions of viewers for three years. These examples demonstrate the undeniable influence of photographs in shaping how events and crises are perceived, determining which ones matter and how they are ultimately judged.”
Thus, Sontag is neither against war photography nor enamored of it. Her critique is directed at the fantasy that the war photograph, by itself, reveals truth and guarantees morality. For her, the image of war is only a starting point. What matters is how the photograph is read, whether its historical and political context is taken into account, and what responsibility the viewer assumes — provided the viewer truly wishes to bear witness rather than merely consume shock.