ABSTRACT
Suffering, like victimhood, is highly contested. The power of the visual to convey suffering has long been recognised. Moreover, there is a wide literature that addresses how audiences, however this term might be understood, make sense of, and/or respond to, the visual as informed by the suffering of others. This chapter offers some thoughts on what might be learned from these kinds of visual representations deploying three concepts informed by victimology. These concepts are pain, horror, and resilience. Throughout this discussion, these concepts are refracted through the lens of victimology, an area of investigation in which the visual has had an increasingly powerful presence in how victimhood is constructed, understood, and responded to Yet, the connection between victimhood and suffering explored is neither simple nor straightforward, and it will be useful to make a few observations about the relationship between them in the first instance.
