Representing Contemporary War (Regarding the Pain of Others) (Book Review‪)‬

Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 144 pp., $20 cloth. Despite living in an age commonly understood as being awash with images of atrocity, there are few writers who theorize the relationship between political conflict and its pictorial representation. This relative absence means that various assertions about the power of pictures have come to dominate popular understanding. Foremost among these are two fundamentally contradictory claims, which, Susan Sontag observes, are "fast approaching the stature of platitudes." (1) One, the "CNN effect" is that the power of news imagery is such that it can alter the course of state policy simply by virtue of being broadcast. The other, the "compassion fatigue" thesis, argues that the abundant supply of imagery has dulled our senses and created a new syndrome of communal inaction.