On Photography

On Photography by Susan Sontag (1977), digested by Rachel Segal Hamilton

What's it about?

According to Sontag, photographs turn the world into a set of collectible objects that we can own. This makes us feel knowledgeable, and powerful. But although we still treat photos as evidence, photographers never simply record the world, they interpret it. They might take multiple shots, for example, selecting the ones that meet their preconceptions. 

This is true for us non-professsionals, too: we use family albums to connect with the past and take holiday snaps to show our friends what we're up to. Bit by bit, though, photography has started to limit our experience. Instead of photographing what we're doing, we do things so that we can photograph them. 

There is a moral dimension to Sontag's critique. By photographing a situation, you can't intervene in it – war photography is horrific, she says, partly because of the way it has become acceptable for a photographer to choose to take a photo rather than to save a life. But images also numb us. The more photographs of suffering we see, the less shocked we are. For Sontag, there is a violence to photography. The camera is predatory because it lets the photographer turn people into objects and to know them in a way they cannot know themselves. 

We try to use photography to make sense of reality but the knowledge it gives us will always be sentimental, superficial, never political. To make matters worse, we're hooked. We don't feel we have really experienced something unless we've photographed it. And so we photograph everything. 

In her own words: 

“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 posessed.” 

“In these last decades 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden our conscience as to arouse it.” 

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” 

How to sound as if you've read it:

People these days feel the need to photograph everything - it's totally ruining our experience of life.