Regarding the Pain of Others

Right away in Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag contextualizes the impact of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, which appeared in 1937 after nearly “two decades of plangent denunciations of war” (6). The rhetoric of Woolf’s words is conventional, and the images described use their own conventional rhetoric—of repetition and reduction and a false sense of united emotion—to describe the horror of war. Sontag’s basic premise in her book is that we don’t share the same reactions to images—to any images—and to presume that we do is counterproductive to Woolf’s proclaimed purpose: to prevent war.

Sontag explains, “Invoking this hypothetical shared experience (‘we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses’), Woolf professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will” (6). Throughout the rest of her own book, Sontag shows the many ways that photographs, particularly of war (possibly because war is so massive and so impacting) are manipulated by others to elicit particular impressions, actions, and ideologies. They are often staged so as to heighten the drama, or presented in a context other than the one in which the activity occurred, thus already “falsified.” They are not “facts” of “reality,” as Woolf presumes, but representations of ideas or attitudes that have been selected and framed, consciously or unconsciously, by the photographer, notwithstanding the physical traces that they appear to be in, in their printed form.

War photographs have been banned or censored, sometimes by the correspondent before they are even photographed, sometimes prohibited or—just the opposite—commissioned and sponsored by militaries or governments. Newspaper and magazine editors select and frame the presentation of the images, often for commercial benefit, playing up their shock value. Museum curators and gallerists (or designers of public spaces) mount photographs of war as “art,” often detracting from their value as documents of “truth” or efforts of sincerity and integrity in the eyes or viewers. Book publishers of war images can endow them with a note of sobriety, proximity, and intimacy, but indeed, spectators of any kind, viewing war photography in large public spaces or on small private screens, bring to it their own differentiated emotions.