In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag was primarily referring to war photography. However, one no less regards the pain of others in photographs of disaster. The presentation analyses the photographs produced and circulated during the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake disaster in Japan, which show destroyed buildings, flooded landscapes, desperate people. It shows that the disastrousness of disaster is (also) created through the pictures of the disasters disseminated by the media. Disaster destroys existing order. The photographs of disaster depict the dissolution of such order, however, they do this in an orderly manner. Providing a qualitative analysis, I will demonstrate key features of this ordered structure. The talk will discuss why and in what way certain pictures reveal themselves to be iconographic of disaster and how they enter the visual memory as its representative.