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What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to kill and be killed across the globe? Timely and thought-provoking, War at a Distance considers how those left on the home front register wars and wartime in their everyday lives, particularly when military conflict remains removed from immediate perception, available only through media forms. Looking back over two centuries, Mary Favret locates the origins of modern wartime in the Napoleonic era and describes how global military operations affected the British populace, as the nation's army and navy waged battles far from home for decades. She reveals that the literature and art produced in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries obsessively cultivated means for feeling as much as understanding such wars, and established forms still relevant today.

Indeed, the very notion of atrocity, of war crime, is associated with the expectation of photographic evidence. Such evidence is, usually, of something posthumous. The remains, as it were - the mounds of skulls in Pol Pot's Cambodia, the mass graves in Guatemala and El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. And this posthumous reality is often the keenest of summations. As Hannah Arendt pointed out soon after the end of the second world war, all the photographs and newsreels of the concentration camps are misleading because they show the camps at the moment the Allied troops marched in. What makes the images unbearable - the piles of corpses and the skeletal survivors - was not at all typical for the camps, which, when they were functioning, exterminated their inmates systematically (by gas, not starvation and illness), then cremated them immediately. And photographs echo photographs: it was inevitable that the photographs of emaciated Bosnian prisoners at Omarska, the Serb death camp created in northern Bosnia in 1992, would recall memories of the photographs taken in the Nazi death camps in 1945. Photographs of atrocity illustrate as well as corroborate. Bypassing disputes about exactly how many were killed (numbers are often inflated at first), the photograph gives the indelible sample. The illustrative function of photographs leaves opinions, prejudices, fantasies, misinformation untouched. The information that many fewer Palestinians died in the assault on Jenin than had been claimed by Palestinian officials (as the Israelis had said all along) made much less impact than the pictures of the razed centre of the refugee camp. And, of course, atrocities that are not secured in our minds by well-known photographic images, or of which we simply have had very few images - the total extermination of the Herero people in Namibia decreed by the German colonial administration in 1904; the Japanese onslaught in China, notably the massacre of nearly 400,000 and the rape of 80,000 Chinese in December 1937, the so-called Rape of Nanking; the rape of some 130,000 women and girls (10,000 of whom committed suicide) by victorious Soviet soldiers unleashed by their commanding officers in Berlin in 1945 - seem more remote. These are memories that few have cared to claim. The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallise around a photograph than around a verbal slogan. And photographs help construct, and revise, our sense of a more distant past, with the posthumous shocks engineered by the circulation of hitherto unknown photographs. Photographs that everyone recognises are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas \"memories\" and, in the long run, that is a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory - it is part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction.

[Susan Sontag]'s book does not anticipate the current role of photographers in Iraq. (Part of the book's argument was delivered as an Amnesty Lecture at Oxford University in February 2001 and took much of its inspiration from Sontag's reconsideration of Holocaust photography.) But the Iraq war transforms Regarding the Pain of Others into more than a smart-set sideshow about an intellectual's reversal. As the images come out of Iraq, Sontag's plainspoken, self- questioning book furnishes meditation of a high order. At times, she seems almost afraid to reach conclusions. But her oscillating and humbled mindfulness restores photography to its place in the humanist tradition. When cameras were invented in 1839, Sontag tells us, the images they made were at first \"read\" as indisputable fact. Just how problematic this naive reading was became clear in the first war photographs, those taken by Roger Fenton in the Crimea in 1855. The British government sent Fenton to counteract newspaper accounts about the privations of British soldiers during the Crimean War. He was under instructions from the War Office not to photograph the dead, maimed or ill. \"Fenton went about rendering the war as a dignified all-male group outing,\" Sontag writes. He also had no compunctions about staging his work. This extended even to the one photograph he took that suggests the bleakness of war, \"The Valley of the Shadow of Death.\" Fenton took pains to arrange the cannonballs that lie, seemingly scattered and random, across an empty battlefield in this famous photograph that has since become an icon for pacifists. Nothing in any of Fenton's photographs conveyed how wretched planning left 22,200 British soldiers to die needlessly from illness and thousands of others to lose appendages to frostbite. The assumption is that photography helped turn the country against the Vietnam War. But the most iconic photographs of that time showed something different from what they purported to represent. Sontag points to one such photograph -- Eddie Adams's picture of South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Vietcong suspect in Saigon. When Adams's Pulitzer Prize-winning image appeared in newspapers in 1968, it caused many to ask how the United States could be allied with someone as brutal as Loan. Some believe it played a role in antiwar protests. Sontag points out that Loan, in effect, staged the photograph for his own reasons. And, as Adams himself said later, Loan's brutality was actually an act of passionate despair; according to the photographer, the Vietcong man had just murdered the family of a friend of Loan's. Whatever the photograph's provenance, its power still affects Sontag, no matter how many times she has seen it.

At every level, \"Regarding the Pain of Others\" is a fiercely challenging book. [Susan Sontag]'s main theme is the imagery of atrocity. Her earlier book \"On Photography\" (1973) remains immensely thought- provoking on its subject. In this new work, she concentrates specifically on the images of violence to which we subject ourselves, and she is again immensely thought-provoking. In the modern world, according to Sontag, the most indelible horrific images (principally of war, the \"largest crime,\" but also of terror, famine, pollution) are likely to be photographs. Photographs shock. They accuse. They assault. They haunt. And they also document. Photographs are, or can be, detachedly objective because they are mechanically instantaneous. But at the same time, they indicate the presumed authenticity of a personal witness. Finally she points to profound hypocrisy and double standards in the way photographers are expected to be more discreet the closer they are to home. Suffering children in Africa, for example, are photographed with a degree of frank exposure that is unlikely to be applied to similar subjects on home soil. The victims of war in a distant country are treated with less respect photographically than innocent victims of terrorism at home. Troops, if \"enemies,\" are treated by photographers with far less \"dignity or compassion\" than our own. Excruciatingly, Sontag refers to \"the wounded Taliban soldier begging for his life\" pictured in a major American paper, yet points out that he \"also had a wife, children, parents, sisters and brothers\" who may one day see these photos \"if they have not already seen them.\"

As [Susan Sontag] says, everyone carries around a mental library of those single images. \"This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding, and remembering... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.\" But she warns that those single images are notoriously unreliable when they are invoked as pieces of unambiguous truth. Some are faked or posed; some are rearrangements of evidence. Doubt still hangs over [Robert Capa]'s famous Republican soldier falling dead on a Spanish battlefield, while Roger Fenton in the Crimean War and Mathew Brady's team in the American Civil War cheerfully scattered extra cannon-balls or lugged corpses into more striking attitudes. (Brady said grandly that \"The Camera Is The Eye of History,\" but we know enough about subjectivity today to define history as a mythopoeic old lady with a squint). Sontag gives many other examples of fiddling with the \"undeniable\" truth of the photograph and asks shrewdly why the discovery of faking is so curiously hurtful to the consumer (Robert Doisneau's kissing lovers in Paris -- it just mustn't be true that they were paid to pose!). A bit loftily, she concludes that \"with time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind -- like most historical evidence.\" But she concludes that staging ended with the Vietnam War, for the simple reason that there were always too many other photographers around. Pictures, after all, do not speak for themselves. Captions can often do the talking. Susan Sontag respects Ernst Friedrich, the German antiwar campaigner in the 1920s, who published a book of horrific images -- corpses, obliterating facial wounds -- with a preaching caption in four languages attached to each photograph. Goya did much the same in his \"Disasters of War,\" writing under the etchings \"One can't look\" or \"This is the Worst!\" or just \"Why?\" But, for reasons not easy to follow, Sontag takes issue with the interpretation laid on Ron Haviv's famous 1992 photograph from Bijeljina in Bosnia, showing a uniformed man kicking a prostrate woman in the head. She challenges the comment by John Kifner of the New York Times: \" ... a Serb militiaman casually kicking a dying Muslim woman in the head. It tells you everything you need to know.\" Sontag objects that the picture by itself, without a context of external evidence, tells you none of those details. It merely suggests that \"war is hell, and that graceful young men with guns are capable of kicking overweight older women lying helpless...\" She is trying to make the point, fair as a generalization, that while narratives make us understand, \"photographs do something else. They haunt us.\" But it's an awkward example to choose, and there is no reason to doubt that Kifner was right about those details. So when does looking at images of slaughter or sadism cease to be \"morbid\" and become something like a duty, a civic obligation? Sontag's underlying argument is that there can be no dividing line, however frail, which fences off the potential of such images for foul excitement. But she offers two examples in which politics and time can at least affect the moral balance. One is My Lai. Ron Haeberle's pictures of that 1968 massacre, which \"became important in bolstering the indignation at this war which was far from inevitable, far from intractable and could have been stopped much sooner.\" There was something to be done about them, in other words. But that did not apply to the New York exhibition three years ago which showed souvenir photographs of small-town lynchings between the 1890s and the 1930s. \"Is looking at such pictures really necessary, given that these horrors lie in a past remote enough to be beyond punishment?\" Some people argued (and if Sontag was one of them, she is not prepared to spoil the tension of the argument by saying so) that the exhibition helped its viewers to understand lynching as the reflection of a belief system -- racism -- which \"by defining one people as less human than another legitimates torture and murder.\" But why should Americans feel that they have some sort of duty to look at lynching images and yet feel that is morbid to inspect pictures of dead children at Hiroshima? It is a matter of whom Americans wish to blame or, \"more precisely, whom do we believe we have the right to blame?\"

\"War was, and still is, the most irresistible --- and picturesque news,\" she writes. But images of war are not the real thing and can be exploited in extraordinarily manipulative ways, she says, citing the staging of photographs dating back as far as the Crimean War. Aesthetics in photography often trump truth, [Susan Sontag] asserts. Sontag launches her \"argument\" with a look at \"Three Guineas,\" Virginia Woolf's reflections on the Spanish Civil War. The premise of \"Three Guineas,\" that women abhor war and men hanker for it, sets the stage for Sontag's ruminations. Photo \"The images say: This is what people can do to each other,\" Susan Sontag writes in \"Regarding the Pain of Others.\" / Annie Leibovitz