The Cruel Radiance

“The Cruel Radiance is a brilliant, lucid, and incisive exploration of photography and political violence. It looks deeply and unsparingly at how photographers have pictured war, genocide, and atrocities, and in so doing illuminates photography’s democratic promise. By making the world present to us even when we want to look away, photographs have the potential to make us think and question together, to draw us into a community of witnesses.”—Kiku Adatto, author of Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op

“This is a magnificent book. Susie Linfield has a good eye for the photographs and a good head for the politics. And she has the moral strength to look at these images of mutilation, death, and destruction, explain their value, and demand that we look at them, too.”—Michael Walzer

“A profoundly thoughtful account of the role of photojournalism in an irremediably violent world, Linfield’s book is as much about conscience and empathy as it is about photography. Examining images from the Spanish Civil War to Rwanda, she accepts no easy, sweeping answers. Rather, with vivid common sense and with painstaking, often abashed humanity, she guides us through the moral minefield where horror meets art, and helps us to see.”—Claudia Roth Pierpont

"A somber, heartfelt plea for readers to see the truth and acknowledge and understand the consequences of humans' potential for inhumanity. This should be required reading for students of journalism and political science and general readers with an interest in human-rights activism."--Library Journal

“Linfield’s great achievement is more than to shake up the orthodoxy that says, ‘Look away!’ It’s a call to arms, an incitement to look closely at the world via the medium of photography, and, implicitly, to do something about it.”—New Humanist

“Beautifully crafted, exquisitely written, and exceptionally powerful in its arguments.”--Design Observer