On Photography

by Susan Sontag

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

Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture.

Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.

There is no decisive moment.

The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear.

Photographers were supposed to do more than just see the world as it is, including its already acclaimed marvels; they were to create interest, by new visual decisions.

Photography is advanced as a form of knowing without knowing: a way of outwitting the world, instead of making a frontal attack on it.