SOURCE: McDonald, Maggie. “Show Me.” New Scientist 177, no. 2384 (1 March 2003): 49.

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...