On Photography

by Susan Sontag

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency.

to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing—which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a “good” picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.

Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world.

An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer.

Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.

Each still photograph is a privileged moment,

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

giving information to people who do not take easily to reading.

The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.

what the reality must be like if it looks this way.”

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

Pictures got taken not only to show what should be admired but to reveal what needs to be confronted, deplored—and fixed up.

They were the vanguard of an army of tourists who arrived by the end of the century, eager for “a good shot” of Indian life.

The tourists invaded the Indians’ privacy, photographing holy objects and the sacred dances and places, if necessary paying the Indians to pose and getting them to revise their ceremonies to provide more photogenic material.

photographing something became a routine part of the procedure for altering it.

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

people wielded cameras as a way of taking possession of the places they visited. Kodak put signs at the entrances of many towns listing what to photograph. Signs marked the places in national parks where visitors should stand with their cameras.

The true modernism is not austerity but a garbage-strewn plenitude—the

this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.

A photograph is only a fragment, and with the passage of time its moorings come unstuck. It drifts away into a soft abstract pastness, open to any kind of reading

a “natural” image; that is, an image which comes into being “by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.”

Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary. 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.

They changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing’s sake.

the habit of photographic seeing—of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs—creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.

Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and judge perspective.

on so bland an ideal of beauty as perfection.

Imperfect technique has come to be appreciated precisely because it breaks the sedate equation of Nature and Beauty.

photographers who, through reflection and effort, managed to transcend the camera’s mechanical nature to meet the standards of art.

Gorin’s short film A Letter to fane (1972)

photographs do not explain; they acknowledge.

photography has inspired its leading practitioners with a need to explain, again and again, what they are doing and why it is valuable.

either as a lucid and precise act of knowing, of conscious intelligence, or as a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter.

For Ansel Adams “a great photograph” has to be “a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”

Photographers seem to need periodically to resist their own knowingness and to remystify what they do.

it almost always means—as in more casual kinds of looking—that the viewer prefers that kind of mood, or respects that intention, or is intrigued by (or feels nostalgic about) that subject.

The formalist approaches to photography cannot account for the power of what has been photographed, and the way distance in time and cultural distance from the photograph increase our interest.

The depredations of time tend to work against paintings. But part of the built-in interest of photographs, and a major source of their aesthetic value, is precisely the transformations that time works upon them, the way they escape the intentions of their makers.

Given enough time, many photographs do acquire an aura.

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.

The traditional fine arts rely on the distinction between authentic and fake, between original and copy,

an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)—a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.