Regarding the Pain of Others is Sontag's thoughtful follow up to her 1977 classic On Photography. It's a photography book without photographs that explores how wartime images shape our perceptions of distant wars. Her descriptions of images from the Civil War to the current war with Afghanistan are evocative and direct. Some are familiar. Others less so. But all serve to raise questions about human nature, our ambivalent relationship to atrocity and the power of images to articulate the horrors of war.
Philosophical, fascinating and dense with ideas- Regarding the Pain of Others is a must read
