'Toothless intellectuals', 'the misery of the poor', 'poetry after Auschwitz', and the white, middle-class audience: the moral perils of Kosky and Wright's 'The Women of Troy' (or, how do we regard the pain of others?)

In one of her meditations on the photographs of war in her 2002 article for The New Yorker, ‘Looking at War: Photography’s view of devastation and death,’ Susan Sontag refers to, by way of example, a picture of a World War I veteran “whose face has been shot away” (Sontag 2002, 89) and compares it to a work of fine art, Hendrick Goltzius’ etching entitled ‘The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus’ (1588). Sontag states that “One horror has its place in a complex subject—figures in a landscape—that displays the artist’s skill of eye and hand. The other is a camera’s record, from very near, of a real person’s unspeakably awful mutilation; that and nothing else”