In March 1921, Woolf wrote, “People go on being shot & hanged in Ireland” (D2 100). Dora Sanger had told her of “mass going on all day in Dublin for some wretched boy killed early on Monday morning. The worst of it is the screen between our eyes & these [?] gallows is so thick. So easily one forgets it–or I do” (D2 100). She asked herself, “Is it a proof of civilisation to envisage suffering at a distance…?” (D2 100). Throughout the twentieth century, that question resonates with increasing insistence as the technologies that bring representations of suffering closer to distant viewers become more sophisticated. Emily Dalgarno notes the coincidence of the Spanish Civil War with changes in camera design that led to the particular significance of the documentary photograph in reporting on that conflict (2). In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag criticizes Woolf for her references to photographs of dead civilians in Spain to support an argument against war in general: “To read in the pictures, as Woolf does, only what confirms a general abhorrence of war is to stand back from an engagement with Spain as a country with a history. It is to dismiss politics” (Sontag 9). Sontag stresses that the pictures Woolf has “conjured up,” as she puts it, “do not in fact show what war, war as such, does. They show a particular way of waging war, a way at that time routinely described as ‘barbaric,’ in which civilians are the target” (9).

Dalgarno's brilliant reading of Three Guineas (1938) in Virginia Woolf and the VisibleWorld shows that Woolf, far from “conjuring up” the photographs to which she refers, in fact consciously decided not to reproduce them in her text. Comparing the use of photographs of dead children by the French newspaper L'Humanité as propaganda against the policy of non-intervention with that of the British press that eschewed the use of such photographs in favor of a detached visual vocabulary of maps and aerial photographs, Dalgarno argues that Woolf satirized in Three Guineas the “view that the documentary photograph is unmediated” (151).