A brilliant clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our
culture-its ubiquity meanings and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her
generation Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of
human violence reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas : How
in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the
horror could be made vivid enough most people would finally take in the outrageousness the
insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies
countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance through the medium of photography)
horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured-or incited-to violence by the
depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such
images? What does it mean to care about the suffering of others far away? First published
more than twenty years after her now-classic book On Photography which changed how we
understand the very condition of being modern Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our
thinking not only about the uses and means of images but about how war itself is waged (and
understood) in our time the limits of sympathy and the obligations of conscience.
