Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. - Susan Sontag

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism.

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.