Review of Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

*Regarding the Pain of Others* by Susan Sontag (2003). Published by Picador.

There are some books in my collection slash personal library that I have had for years, but never had the chance to read. Because there is always something new and shiny to get ahold of, there are some titles I have seriously neglected in the name of procrastination.

In order to combat this, I decided to make a massive book spreadsheet to see what kinds of books I have and have not read in the years that I’ve had them. Seeing the specific names right in front of me has been so helpful because of the fact it’s neat and organized by genre and author name, and this has actually helped make a dent in what I haven’t read.

Regarding the Pain of Others I bought in the middle of the COVID pandemic, right when lockdown was in its full height. Back then the library around me was closed, so that meant I was relying on buying books or finding them online in order to keep me entertained as the days dwindled by.

It took me over four years to read this book, despite all of the research I have done on Sontag and the essays I have read from her brilliant mind.

In the middle of my thesis, I thought it was appropriate to read this, as a chunk of my thesis was examining the impacts of depictions of women’s suffering in the Korean postcolonial and colonial period in regards to Korean women’s literature.

Anyways, I’m starting to ramble. Here’s my review.

Depicting unspeakable horrors through images might have even more severe consequences than we think.

So Regarding the Pain of Others is an essay that basically is long enough to be a book. She has one major argument through the entire book: we look at images of suffering and war, and it doesn’t really convey the intricacies of the situation.

Sontag specifically points out war imagery, whether it is from the Vietnam War or some other global conflict that hits American newspapers and television screens across the country.

Under Sontag’s logic, when someone looks at a picture of a lynching, for example, they might acknowledge that it is a terrible thing (or, depending on how they were raised and if there’s embedded racism, they might think the opposite), but it also creates desensitization.

An image might be able to show a really terrible act, but it might not create the emotional disturbance of witnessing live in front of you. The more people see these kinds of images, the more they start to accept it as a truth of the moment and situation.

There’s also something I learned early on in my film criticism classes that I thought was really applicable to the writing and thought work that Sontag is doing throughout this essay: the idea that pictures and film are selling a narrative.

For example, when you take a picture in the midst of a war, you might manipulate some of the details that go into it. You might wait until all of the bodies are piled up to be burned, or you could be embedded within a specific military unit. Thus you only capture their perspective.

Not everything is black and white, so each photograph has a narrative and a power dynamic to it. You’re not the naked, bloodied child running out of a Vietnamese village. Nor are you a worker in the World Trade Center moments after the planes struck the first tower.

Overall Thoughts

Something I thought really stretched my brain thin was seeing Civil War in a movie theater after reading this. My review of that movie will go up in the blog in the next month or so, but I nearly had a panic attack watching that movie and its depictions of war photography.

This is a book that focuses on war photography, so seeing these in two in conversation with each other was pretty magical and interesting to see. A lot of that movie focuses on seeing people you know shot dead in front of you then taking pictures of it, sacrificing a part of yourself for the perfect shot.

Anyways, this is such a thought provoking book. I think Sontag is brilliant for so many reasons, and I’ll continue returning to her throughout the years.

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