I haven’t read Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” or “Regarding the Suffering of Others,” both extended meditations on the public consumption of images of suffering, but I do have the feeling that a recent experience of mine (and many others as well, no doubt) with a horrifying photograph in the mainstream media would make a fitting post-mortem footnote to her famous argument with such consumption.

Admittedly, in my weaker moments I can be as much a “tragiholic” as the next person, and am well aware how easily I gravitate toward the kind of graphic images that Sontag contends with for their anesthetizing effect. It seems that no less a problem than chronic desensitization—perhaps she makes the same point—is how we use these images to feel better about our own forms of suffering in comparison to that of others. For what we might register as the shock of compassion is often nothing more than a twisted form of self-affirmation. Well, at least I’m not starving in Haiti…or shopping in Baghdad…or watching Janjaweed rape my wife and daughters in Darfur.

You get the idea. Or rather, you get the picture.

But then there are those images that simply obliterate even the capacity to process them, let alone use them for one’s own spiritually stunted ends.

Such was the case with the front-page photograph on the recent June 26th issue of the New York Times, which featured a wailing African toddler with casts on both feet. Beneath a heading in boldface print–“Suffering Great and Small”–the caption read:

“An 11-month old boy with broken legs found shelter in a church in Harare, Zimbabwe. His mother said youths with the governing party shattered his legs while trying to make her disclose the whereabouts of her husband, an opposition supporter.”

Who needs the bloated atheistic manifestoes of a Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris when reality does the job for them and far more effectively than they could ever hope to? Show me Hitchens’ recent book, God is Not Great: How Religion Pollutes Everything, and I’ll limit my criticism to the illogical title alone, which suggests nothing more than a book-length cheap shot. (Perhaps for another blog on another day.)

But show me the photo of that baby boy in Zimbabwe, and I’m ready to huck any notions of the Lord God Almighty who has a hand in our hopeless world.

So you can imagine my surprise when, upon searching the online archives of the Times this morning for the photograph in question, I came across the following “Editors’ Note,” dated July 9th, two weeks after the initial publication:

“After the picture and an accompanying article that also described the injuries were published, the New York Times took the boy to a medical clinic in Harare for help. When the casts were removed, medical workers there discovered the boy had club feet. Doctors said on Monday that X-rays of the baby’s legs showed no evidence of bone fractures.

“The mother subsequently admitted that she had exaggerated injuries she said had been sustained by the boy during an attack by governing party militia. In multiple interviews, she said that youths backing President Robert Mugabe had thrown her son to the concrete floor—and she still says that event did occur.

“The owner of the house where she and the baby were staying confirmed that marauding youths from the governing party had attacked the house. He said he believed the baby had been thrown to the floor during the attack, but the owner was in a different room and did not witness it firsthand. The landlord, other lodgers, neighbors and opposition supporters also confirmed that the mother had been singled out because her husband was an opposition member.

“The mother, however, later told the Times that the boy had been wearing casts even at the time of the attack, as part of a treatment he had received for his club feet at a different medical facility. She said she misrepresented the boy’s injuries to generate help because she could not afford corrective surgery for the boy.”

Not that a toddler getting thrown to the floor by a mob is something to feel much better about; nor does it suggest a stable faith on my part that an editorial correction might in any way “correct” my brush with an all-too-present sense of nihilism that the original story induced.

So what do we do? More of the same, no doubt, that is, navigate the times in which we live—times in which Kevin Carter, the photographer who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his picture of a starving Sudanese girl stalked by a vulture as she crawled to a feeding center, later killed himself in part for the haunting effect of the horrors he had witnessed.

Susan Sontag, rest in peace.