Regarding the pain of others

ist publishing is an independent small publisher specializing in books on contemporary culture and art.

“Regarding the Pain of Others” is an essay by american critic and writer Susan Sontag, published as a standalone book in February 2003, one month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Sontag continues Virginia Woolf’s interwar reflections on the nature of war and raises the question of whether photography can prevent violence: if photography makes the horrors fully visible, can it help stop wars — or does it, on the contrary, lead to the conduct of a just war?

The book also revisits Sontag’s earlier arguments from “On Photography”. In the constant flow of images reproduced in the news, do events become real for viewers in other countries? Or does the overabundance of images risk turning into a normalized spectacle? In this essay, Sontag places photography within the history of the iconography of suffering, reflecting on perception and the vulnerability of the gaze, as well as on photography’s relationship to death and to the memory of war — both collective and individual.