Against an older view of war photography that images of brutality and suffering will surely unite people of good will—“us”—against violence, Susan Sontag observes that we cannot take for granted the “we” when the subject at hand is looking at other people’s pain. This would neglect the cultural frame of interpretation—what can be depicted, which lives can be grieved, what is interesting, abject, or salacious within a given historical moment. According to Sontag, then, photographs in and of themselves cannot offer understanding of what they depict (which is the work of narrative); rather, she writes, they “do something else: they haunt us.”