On Photography

by Susan Sontag

In photographing dwarfs, you don’t get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

The pious uplift of Steichen’s photograph anthology and the cool dejection of the Arbus retrospective both render history and politics irrelevant. One does so by universalizing the human condition, into joy; the other by atomizing it, into horror.

Brassaï denounced photographers who try to trap their subjects off-guard, in the erroneous belief that something special will be revealed about them.1 In the world colonized by Arbus, subjects are always revealing themselves. There is no decisive moment. Arbus’s view that self-revelation is a continuous, evenly distributed process is another way of maintaining the Whitmanesque imperative: treat all moments as of equal consequence.

Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.

photographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist.

Faced with the awesome spread and alienness of a newly settled continent, people wielded cameras as a way of taking possession of the places they visited.

Berenice Abbott writes: “The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes past.”

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans—the used things, warm with generations of human touch, that Rilke celebrated in The Duino Elegies as being essential to a human landscape.