On Photography

by Susan Sontag

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.

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.

What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs.

Recently, 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.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.

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. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on.

They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.

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 suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them.

A photograph of 1900 that was affecting then because of its subject would, today, be more likely to move us because it is a photograph taken in 1900.

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

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.

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

We learn to see ourselves photographically: to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph.

The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular.

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

the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth.

Photography, like pop art, reassures viewers that art isn’t hard; it seems to be more about subjects than about art.

But if photographs demean, paintings distort in the opposite way: they make grandiose.

In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.

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.

To consume means to burn, to use up—and, therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more.