REGARDING THE PAINTING OF OTHERS

By Lisa Knoll

23/09/2026

Susan Sontag on the ethics of looking, and what it means to paint the Blitz rather than photograph it

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag revisited and partly revised the more sceptical position on war photography she had taken decades earlier in On Photography, arriving at a more careful question: not whether images of suffering are inherently exploitative, but what particular conditions determine whether such an image produces genuine understanding in a viewer or merely a passing, consumable shock [1]. Central to her later argument was a distinction between photographs, which claim an evidentiary relationship to a specific real moment, and painted or drawn depictions of the same subject matter, which make no such claim and are read differently by viewers as a result [2].

Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art, now running at IWM London, tests this distinction directly, since the exhibition deliberately foregrounds paintings and drawings — the exhibition deliberately foregrounds more than forty paintings and drawings — including works by Evelyn Dunbar, Duncan Grant and Frances Macdonald — over the photographic record of the Blitz that most visitors will already carry in their heads from countless documentary sources. The curatorial choice is not incidental. War artists commissioned during the Second World War were, in a meaningful sense, doing something structurally different from photojournalists working the same streets: producing images that were understood, by artist and viewer alike, as interpretation rather than evidence.

Sontag’s framework suggests this distinction changes what a viewer is permitted, or invited, to feel in front of the work. A photograph of bomb damage functions, implicitly, as a claim: this specific devastation occurred, at this specific place and time, and you are looking at its trace. A painting of the same subject carries no equivalent evidentiary weight, and paradoxically this can free a viewer to sit with the image’s emotional and aesthetic register — the exhibition’s own title, pairing “beauty” with “destruction,” would sit uneasily beside a photograph of the same bombed street, but reads as a legitimate description of what a wartime painter might genuinely have found in the scene.

This is not to suggest paintings of the Blitz are therefore ethically weightless in ways photographs are not. Sontag’s later work was explicit that no image, in any medium, escapes the question of what a viewer’s attention to depicted suffering is actually accomplishing — whether it produces something resembling understanding, or merely confirms a comfortable emotional response already decided in advance [3]. A painting that renders bomb-damaged London aesthetically compelling risks precisely the danger Sontag identified in the most spectacular war photography: transforming devastation into a form the eye finds pleasurable to consume, whatever the artist’s sincere intentions.

Beauty and Destruction runs at IWM London until 1 November 2026, drawing on the museum’s own substantial art collection alongside photographs, film and oral testimony. Visited with Sontag’s distinction actively in mind, it offers an unusually direct opportunity to test, work by work, whether the difference between depicting and documenting suffering actually changes what a viewer takes away — or whether, as Sontag ultimately suspected, the deeper ethical question sits with the viewer’s attention rather than with the medium at all.

[1] Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[2] Sontag, S. (2003), pp. 26–31.

[3] Sontag, S. (2003), p. 117.