Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20, ISBN 0374248583 Reviewed by Maggie McDonald
“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…
