On Photography

by Susan Sontag

This very passivity—and ubiquity—of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself—a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.

As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life.

Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic—Germans, Japanese, and Americans.

The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing.

In the hyperbole that markets cars like guns, there is at least this much truth: except in wartime, cars kill more people than guns do.

The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.