On Photography

by Susan Sontag

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

they will get something down that is disappearing—and, often, hasten its disappearance by photographing it.

photographs are themselves instant antiques.

Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle. As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions.

By disclosing the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things, photography transforms reality into a tautology.

Nothing is more acceptable today than the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as an everyday activity and as a branch of high art.

photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac’s Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget’s Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry.

to presume that the image is absolutely distinct from the object depicted—is part of that process of desacralization which separates us irrevocably from the world of sacred times and places in which an image was taken to participate in the reality of the object depicted.

Not in the sacred moment bc we are showing it

Antonioni was reproached for “forcibly taking shots against people’s wishes,” like “a thief.”

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.

Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself.