This article adopts a discursive approach to analyse media representations, including news media imagery and interviews, conveying personal responses to the 2005 London bombings. Through a deep reading of the case of one survivor who featured prominently in the UK media, it explores how the emotional and affective qualities of witnessing the suffering of others become generative of intersubjective relations. This intersubjective nature of witnessing casts media representations with indeterminate qualities that can redistribute agency in both negative and positive ways.