Regarding the Pain of Others

“Watching the Pain of Others” is an essay by American critic and writer Susan Sontag, published as a separate book in February 2003, a month before the US invasion of Iraq. Sontag continues Virginia Woolf’s interwar reflections on the nature of war and raises the question of the ability of photography to prevent violence: if photography makes horrors visible in all their detail, can it influence the end of wars or, conversely, lead to the conduct of just wars? “Watching the Pain of Others” is also a revision of Sontag’s own theses from On Photography (1977). In the stream of so many other images replicated in the news, do events become real for viewers from other countries? Does the excess of photographs risk remaining a normalized indoor spectacle? In the essay, Sontag places photography in the history of the iconography of suffering, reflects on perception and the vulnerability of the gaze, photography and death, photography and memories of war - collective and individual.