In the introduction to this outstanding volume, collaborator Mark Reinhardt raises the question of spectator complicity and “our ‘wounded attachments’ to affliction” in the contemporary image-world, pinpointing those potent scenes of suffering which are “often formally striking or beautifully rendered” (7). More than a timely engagement with shifts in photographic practice, Beautiful Suffering explores contending strategies in how we expose, frame and perceive human pain and suffering, and ultimately strives to carve out a more politically productive workspace for the medium and its humanitarian potential.

Beautiful Suffering comprises two parts – the first an interdisciplinary collection of five essays, and the second a retrospective of an exhibition of the same title on display during 2006 at the Williams College Museum of Art. Political theorist Mark Reinhardt opens the volume by tackling the core intersections in aesthetics and politics through an “aesthetics of acknowledgment” that can better cope with anxieties inherent in photography itself. In the second piece, curator John Stromberg details the rise of orthodox documentary photography in 1930s America, and how these formative struggles can be read as historical antecedents for current debates and modes of representation. The following two essays are written by art historians who investigate the function, proliferation and commodification of images within various media. Erina Duganne evaluates the distributional strategies and appropriation of images by several key photographers (e.g. Salgado, Jaar, Delahaye, Serrano) and current trends in conflict photojournalism, while Holly Edwards extends this analysis with a case study of the well-known “Afghan girl” image taken by Steve McCurry, tracking its variable reprints and recirculation since the mid-1980s. The concluding essay by cultural theorist Mieke Bal pushes these horizons even further by utilizing a select few images from the exhibition to formulate a theory of political art, one which necessitates an ongoing dialogue with photography in particular.

One of the greatest strengths and innovations is definitely the book's design, particularly within the latter half, which carefully and generously arranges the fifty-nine plates and wall texts (a diverse selection from the 1980s onwards taken from all sites and sectors – photojournalism, art, advertising, the mundane and fundraising) to closely mirror the original exhibition. The volume's layout is indicative of an open-ended curatorial agenda that attempts not only to avoid anaesthetized viewing and exploitative voyeurism, but more purposively to interrogate such outcomes and potential patterns; moreover, it allows ample space and options for navigating the images, inviting the reader to access them standalone and first, alongside their indexes and textual cross references, or last, after encountering the theoretical essays. Beautiful Suffering offers an intriguing, critical perspective for a number of disciplines and, perhaps more importantly, encompasses many of our most pervasive and taxing political and aesthetic quandaries without closing off the question of how complicity registers in everyday life.