UCLA, 26 August 2011. Something happened to my notes on Box 175, the box containing the research materials for Regarding the Pain of Others. All the notes have gone. The Leica ads, Fenton and First World War photography materials, the Elizabeth Bishop poem … the anthropological gaze – everything gone. I am trying to reconstruct the notes, but it is not simple. In the attempt to remember, I realise that Sontag's research relied above all on newspaper and magazine articles, in particular The New Yorker and The New York Times. But there was also an article in Italian bearing in its title the phrase il dolore degli altri – the pain of others. I remember thinking that her writing fed on other languages. (She read her favourite authors in different languages, and she wrote about translation.) The Italian article spoke of the distance between the observer and the object of the gaze in photographs of pain. Because it remarked on the sheltered position of the observer in those images, it might have been germinal to a key idea of her last book on photography: the haunting hiatus between victim and perpetrator, who have become the poles in the cruel theatre of art-related critical reflection.

Sontag had always been concerned with the reduction and simplification of the world; she had oscillated between the lure of rigid formalistic face-to-face between the viewer and the viewed (the amorous contemplation of her earlier writings on interpretation), and the destabilising stare of what is in excess of our understanding (especially after the encounter with New York avant-garde art). Photography had offered an opening, a truce. It had strewn the distance between the thinker and the world with the cyclical return of the vulnerability of Being, transforming the distance into an unlimited vista of floating signifiers voluptuously severed from the burden of meaning. After the Verfall der Aura, after the semantic shell of things had been shattered, intellectual inquiry was no longer conceivable as a reconstruction of wholes. The thinker may now excavate the more emblematic fragments (On Photography 76). Jubilation appeased for a while some frightening inability of the mind.