SOURCE: Nehamas, Alexander. “The Other Eye of the Beholder.” American Prospect 14, no. 8 (September 2003): 62-3.

In the following review, Nehamas praises Sontag's opinions in Regarding the Pain of Others, contending that she makes honest assertions about the effects that pictures depicting brutality and suffering can have on the public.

“Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death”: Thirty years after the first of the essays eventually collected in On Photography, which was published in 1977, Susan Sontag is still troubled by the aesthetic, moral and political ambiguities of the medium. Regarding the Pain of Others is her erudite, subtle and provocative—though also tentative and sometimes inconclusive—meditation on the tensions inherent in photographs of war, death and devastation. Such pictures seem to multiply with every passing day. Does that make their horrors more palpable or less? Many are technically proficient; some are even beautiful. Does...