Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
No Ukrainian needs to be reminded of the moral hazards posed by photographs of war and atrocity. Do they energize those who look at them, or do they further numb them? To put it even more starkly, are photographs—and, by extension, videos on YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, and the rest—contexts for the nurturing of solidarity or, instead, are they forms of socially acceptable voyeurism? Take as a concrete example the two photos, well-known throughout Ukraine, of the Azovstal defender Mykhailo Dianov. The first was made shortly before he was taken prisoner by the Russians. Although his clothes are filthy and he has his arm in a sling, Dianov still looks strong and determined. The second was made just after he was released after four months as a POW. Dianov is emaciated to what appears very close to the point of starvation; he is also very badly disfigured. For Ukrainians living in Ukraine, these two photographs pose no moral hazard. Someone looking at them in Kyiv, Kryvyi Rih, or Mykolayiv has no need for additional explanation: Mykhailo Dianov’s resistance is Ukraine’s resistance, his suffering Ukraine’s suffering incarnate. And the context in which a Ukrainian viewer will have seen these photos is one in which, even if they are far from the frontlines, they themselves are under constant threat from Shaheds, Izkanders, and long-range artillery. Self-evidently, few will have endured what Dianov endured, but this does not mean that they have not themselves endured a great deal. For virtually everyone in Ukraine in 2025, the loss of at least one person so very dear to them, and very likely more than one, is almost guaranteed. In short, a Ukrainian looking at these two photographs is not in any morally relevant sense a spectator.
But, as is invariably the case with any photograph that is seen globally, the people who need no explanation of what they are seeing are going to be vastly outnumbered by those who are unlikely to know much, if indeed anything at all, about the subject matter. They will, as the American essayist George W. S. Trow once described it, be operating “in the context of no context.” There is no remedy for this, and anyone pretending otherwise is simply fooling themselves. Of course, it would be wonderful if everyone being bombarded all the time by a surfeit of images—“image-glut,” my mother called it—could pay attention to all of them, grieve with the ones that command grief, bleed with the ones that bleed, and, above all, maintain their moral focus. But this is not the world any of us—very much including any Ukrainian—actually inhabits or is ever likely to inhabit. There is no way of compelling those of us outside Ukraine to pay attention in the way a Ukrainian in Ukraine pays attention. But if one is being morally serious, expecting that everyone, everywhere, will care all the time about all suffering everywhere, is to take refuge in infantile utopianism. At any time, those likely to view these photos outside Ukraine, whenever they feel like it, can scroll away from the page, press ‘search’ for something else, or turn the computer off altogether. Regarding the Pain of Others was the last book my mother wrote before her death in 2004. Although today, practically everyone in the world has at least some—and usually many—opportunities to witness other people's sufferings through photography, unless the photo portrays a cause particularly dear to one, visual images of war and suffering are, she wrote, "by definition images of which, sooner or later, one will tire.”
And it is important not to fall into the moral solecism of believing oneself to be somehow morally superior to such feelings, for these are universal and inescapable, however much one might wish otherwise. To return to the two photos of Mykhailo Dianov, while a Ukrainian will be loathe to tire of them, and may well never do so, is that Ukrainian going to have the same fidelity of focus when confronted by images of a Gazan, or a Tigrayan Mihailo Dianov, of whom, alas, there are many? The answer is obvious, and not only because it is simply human nature to find it, as my mother wrote, "intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's." Also because, to compare sufferings—my mother was thinking specifically of how the Sarajevans with whom she spent the terrible siege year of 1994 felt when lectured by outsiders about how bad things were in other places, and every Ukrainian knows there is a local version of this lecture—is to in effect ask the question, "Which hell is worse?" and thus "demoting...martyrdom to a mere instance." Did Sarajevans then and Ukrainians now have the absolute right to be more concerned with their own sufferings than those of others? Of course they did and do. But so, just as unquestionably, do Gazans and Tigrayans have that right. My mother saw the moral complexity of this clearly, saw that human beings are not altruism machines, nor are our minds and hearts breeder reactors dedicated to the task of producing limitless solidarity. But, beyond emphasizing the fact that, “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.” This moral challenge she would have left to Ukrainians, Gazans, and Tigrayans.
The moral challenge my mother was trying to address in Regarding the Pain of Others was a different one. She began with the premise that, as she put it, “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience.” What, she asked, does it mean to be that spectator, recognizing that it is in the nature of this experience, no matter the heft of one’s moral ambitions, for the gamut of reactions from distancing to indifference to be ever present possibilities? My mother thought the relentless diffusion of images of pain and horror, inexorably followed by what observers going back to the Canadian philosopher of the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan, whose 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, have called the resulting “information overload” have “[sapped] our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence.” She might have added that this psychic bombardment was such that today even sympathy is sick. Indeed, Regarding the Pain of Others is, to a considerable extent, an indictment of sympathy as it is conventionally understood today. “So far as we feel sympathy,” my mother wrote, “we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response.”
The skeptical reader may worry that putting sympathy on ethical trial in this way risks throwing out an idea for which, even conceding its limitations, at present there is no replacement. I once wrote that I was a son, not a medium, and so I advance what I think my mother’s reply would have been with the appropriate caveats. But what I believe she would have pointed out is that, as a method of engendering solidarity, sympathy has failed. And the question of whether it is possible to practice sympathy effectively in our age and, assuming that this can be done, how to do it, is the real project of Regarding the Pain of Others. For Ukrainians today, as for Bosnians in the early 1990s, this has become all too painfully and terrifyingly self-evident. Yes, the West sympathizes with Ukraine. This, to be clear, is absolutely preferable to the lack of sympathy, even hostility—there can be no sugar-coating this—so common in other regions of the world. However, just as the West sympathized but did not intervene in Bosnia, so the West sympathizes but somehow has never, since the full scale invasion in February of 2022, given Ukraine the military means to defeat Russia. I pray this will change, but prayers for ATCMS and F-16s are not ATCMS and F-16s. For now at least, my mother’s words remain all too tragically appropriate. “Compassion,” she wrote, “is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing ‘we’ can do—but who is that ‘we’?—and nothing ‘they’ can do either—and who are ‘they’?—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.” The words might as well have been taken from an evening news broadcast about Ukraine emanating from Washington, Brussels, or Berlin.
In an ideal world, the solution would be to replace the self-indulgent, media-induced (which, by definition, means transitory) compassion with what my mother in her 1977 book On Photography called “an ecology of images.” In Regarding the Pain of Others, which is in important ways a reconsideration, at least with regard to war photography, of the views she championed in that earlier work, she acknowledged that there was not going to be such an ecology of images, and that, “No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror [so as] to keep fresh its ability to shock.” And yet, while the existential war for both its physical and cultural survival Ukraine is fighting today would have horrified her. In no way would it have surprised her. She knew the horrors were not going to abate. And she had little time for those who today—as Ukrainians know to their cost—just as they did in 2004 when she wrote the book, are “permanently surprised that depravity exists, who [continue] to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties.”
We all know such people in the West, people who were surprised by Bucha, people who, as my mother put it, have “not yet reached moral or psychological adulthood.” For her, though, Bucha would have been unforgivable but also unsurprising, for, as she wrote, “No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.”
How, then, is a reader in 2024, especially a Ukrainian reader, to approach Regarding the Pain of Others? The answer, I think, is that it is, above all, a warning: a warning against the moral dead end that sympathy, at least the version of it that allows us to experience the pain of others at a safe distance, can become if not accompanied by self-reflection. The answer is not that, despite all its moral ambiguities, my mother advocated looking away from these images. For her, to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes imposed the obligation “to think about what it means to look at them.” In other words, to put such looking under what my mother called “the supervision of reason and conscience.” She was not being an armchair moralist here; she was no stranger to war, from Haiphong under the flattening bombardment of US B-52 bombers during the Vietnam War, to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, and finally to besieged Sarajevo beginning in the spring 1993. And while I am confident of few things that my mother would have thought were she alive today, I find it impossible to imagine her not supporting Ukraine as passionately and tirelessly as she supported Bosnia thirty years ago. Of course, she knew reason and conscience would not be nearly enough. “To designate a hell,” she wrote, “is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames.” Still, she insisted, “It seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others.”
In contrast to what has all but become the norm among contemporary intellectuals in the West, that one can and must wish or hope to find answers, no matter how little relation those wishes and hopes bear to reality, Regarding the Pain of others offers an alternative to that wishful thinking. Though it has no formula for how to turn compassion into active solidarity, to me, my mother's refusal to pretend that one thinks ought to happen actually can happen if only one theorizes enough, does her honor. It should be obvious that I hope Ukrainian readers will agree.
Photo by Cecilia Nuin
David Rieff is a New York-based journalist and author. During the nineteen-nineties, he covered conflicts in Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Liberia), the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), and in the early two-thousands in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel-Palestine. Rieff has written extensively about Latin America, with a particular focus on Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina. He is the author of eleven books, including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the 21st century, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies, and, most recently, Desire and Fate (Eris Press), a reflection on another kind of war—the contemporary culture wars. Since the spring of 2022, in the wake of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rieff has been focused on Ukraine and now teaches at National University Kyiv Mohyla Academy in the Ukrainian capital.