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.

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.

I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph.

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see. —Emmet Gowin