Sontag returned to photography twenty-six years after On Photography to reckon with something she’d left unresolved: what happens when we look at images of suffering? The book wrestles with war photography, compassion fatigue, and the ethics of spectatorship without offering easy answers. She pushes back against her own earlier argument that images inevitably anaesthetise us, arriving at something more nuanced — that photographs of atrocity can still shock, still matter, but only if we bring the right kind of attention.