[In the following review, McDonald comments on Sontag's study Regarding the Pain of Others, noting the various potential effects that photographs can produce in modern viewers constantly inundated with images from news sources, advertising, and entertainment.]

“When Capa's falling soldier appeared in Life opposite a Vitalis ad, there was a huge, unbridgeable difference in look between the two kinds of photographs, ‘editorial’ and ‘advertising’. Now there is not,” says Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others.

Sontag is examining the way in which we see images, how the lack of context in art, reportage and advertising impoverish our understanding of the world. This smearing of boundaries between those categories means that we cannot be certain about the authenticity of the photograph itself. For an advertisement, a scene is staged. Until the widespread use of the SLR camera in the Vietnam War, says Sontag, we could not be certain that war scenes—including that of Capa's falling soldier—were not staged or restaged for the photographer. The length of time it then took to capture an image made it more likely that this was done than not.

But photographs are sometimes the only way we can understand what happens in a war. Sontag mentions the British air force bombing in Iraq during the 1920s. Photographs of a destroyed village, Kushan-Al-Ajaza, are part of the evidence a young squadron leader offers to show that in under an hour a few planes can practically wipe out a place, killing a third of its inhabitants.

But we are less likely to see that kind of evidence these days. Censorship too plays a part: Sontag describes the careful editing of access by photographers to war theatres, from the Crimea to the Falklands, and points out we are increasingly denied that access.

What can be seen is often disturbing, and Sontag explores the fascination that the shocking has. Sometimes the distancing of atrocity is a palliative for viewers: from the people dying from starvation in Ethiopia to a wounded Taliban soldier begging for his life, these pictures are from a Western point of view exotic, even colonised, thus safer to see.

Why are we fascinated by the shocking anyway? Sontag's passionate exploration of what it is we see and how the destruction of context impoverishes our world view is compelling. She offers uncomfortable answers. To pursue this further, try Nigel Spivey's brilliant cultural history, Enduring Creation, in which he explores the representation of pain in Western art. He examines our response to, for example, a tortured crucifixion, asking why and if we can find pain beautiful. The viscera of a Benetton advertisement and pictures of mass graves in Kosovo both catch our eyes. Understanding why and how is vital.