In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag directly addresses an issue that she has mentioned in previous works (namely On Photographs): the applicability of war images for use in pacifist efforts, as well as their effectiveness in the endeavor to force their viewers to understand the brutal reality of war. She begins this long essay by considering a passage from Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, a book dealing with the Spanish Civil War, arguing that Woolf's objection to the discrepancy between different views on war is too weak; instead of merely being subject to the differences between men and women, views on war are far from uniform, and different pieces of evidence lead different people to drastically different conclusions.
Through the rest of the work, Sontag uses various illustrations to argue the point that horribly disturbing images of war can be interpreted in many ways, unlike Woolf's devoted pacifistic ideas: a photograph of a dismembered child could either convince a viewer that war is an atrocity that must be stopped, or that the army needs to redouble its efforts to end the war as soon as possible. It's equally likely that the appeal to halt the spread of militancy might spur it on instead.
Tracing the development of technology alongside military history, Sontag demonstrates the importance of the Spanish Civil War: it was the first war to be attended by a crew of photographers to record it and send it home. Photographs also have a unique advantage over other forms of communication and recording: they are necessarily objective, and yet they are still taken from a subjective point of view, lending credibility to whatever argument is propagated by the photographer, an important development for the advent of photojournalism in the 1940s alongside World War II.
For much of this work, Sontag wrestles with this question: what is the difference between simply representing atrocity and arguing against it? Is the mere representation an argument, or is it an invitation to find it pleasurable or miserable? The sheer amount of coverage of death in the modern era, moreover, has begun to normalize it, taking away from the original power of the image. There is an intriguing twofold nature of the world in context of the image: the public opinion is shaped by the media, much of which comes in the form of images. At the same time, the hyper-saturation of images has dulled the public's sensibilities, making them callous. Television is just another step in this degenerative process; it's effective for now, but already it's used as a mechanism for coping with short attention spans and a constant desire for more stimulation.
Sontag ends this essay with the argument that, while these images can be effective in their own right, they will never be able to truly encapsulate war and allow viewers to experience it secondhand, simply because they have never experienced it firsthand. War photography can be used well, but perhaps not to the extent or effectiveness that was once hoped.
