A professor of journalism at New York University asks how documentary photography has always worked alongside history, taking on the hard task of representing the good (or bad) conscience of society. Through the critics (from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmodernists), emblematic cases (images of the Holocaust, of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, of African tragedies and recent terrorist attacks) and the great war photographers (Robert Capa, James Nachtwey and Gilles Peress), she shows how looking at certain images, and learning to see the people portrayed, is an ethically and politically necessary act that binds us to our modern history of violence and measures our tolerance for cruelty. A lucid and complete book that dispels some myths and helps, with its broad bibliography, to know and consider the images that tell the dark side of our world. "What photographs offer is a unique and powerful dialectic between immediate appearances and more lasting, sometimes unconscious associations and the knowledge we bring to them."