On Photography

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. […] 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.”

The camera creates literal and metaphorical distance between subjects and their surroundings or experiences. Sontag theorizes that people consume cameras, like cars or guns, as a tool for power fantasies that help consumers master situations.

“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.”

Sontag views photographers as inherently passive observers. To take a candid photograph means to make a conscious decision to not intervene in a situation or change the circumstances that one is photographing. For Sontag, this is most relevant in photojournalism like war photography or photographs of accident scenes. Sontag’s photographer acts as an agent of the status quo and reinforces sentiment around it.

“The pious uplift of Steichen’s photograph anthology and the cool dejection of the Arbus retrospective both render history and politics irrelevant. One does so by universalizing the human condition, into joy; the other by atomizing it, into horror.”

Steichen’s “The Family of Man” and Arbus’s portfolio are two sides of same coin, reflective of Whitman’s “euphoric humanism.” Arbus’s work focuses on the outsider, which paradoxically assumes a coherent and stable “insider” who can view the marginalized subjects with fascination, while Steichen more obviously believes in Whitman’s project of unifying humanity. By relating these two drastically different approaches to photography back to Whitman, Sontag makes it rhetorically impossible for American photography to do anything but serve Whitman’s nationalism and fervor for American unity.

“[There] is a large difference between the activity of a photographer, which is always willed, and the activity of a writer, which may not be. One has the right to, may feel compelled to, give voice to one’s own pain—which is, in any case, one’s own property. One volunteers to seek out the pain of others.”

Sontag uses the language of property to strengthen her argument surrounding photography’s relationship to capitalism. The camera is a tool that enables photographers to use others’ labor for their own gain. This intrusion into the “property” and labor of others reinforces Sontag’s notion that the photographer is a colonizer.

“Arbus’s work is a good instance of a leading tendency of high art in capitalist countries: to suppress, or at least reduce, moral and sensory queasiness. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals […]. In the long run, it works out not as a liberation of but as a subtraction from the self: a pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life.”

Marxists often discuss modernity in terms of “alienation,” or how separated people are from one another. Sontag believes that high art and its turn toward the shock factor further alienate people and render them inert. Sontag views photography an exercise to determine who can stomach more shocking images than others, which becomes a mark of virtue.

“The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed. The whole point of photographing people is that you are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them. The photographer is [a] supertourist […]. The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences […].”

Through Sontag’s use of metaphor, the camera becomes a passport—a technology of border-patrol. With the introduction of the passport metaphor, Sontag links the tourist, the colonizer, and the notion of border-policing. These concepts come together in the “supertourist” figure of the photographer.

“What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class.”

Sontag theorizes that photographs can provide glimpses into socioeconomic conditions that are alien to people’s current reality. Sontag believes that this socioeconomic discordance is the central mechanism for surrealism and is always present in the photograph viewing experience.

“Photography conceived as social documentation was an instrument of that essentially middle-class attitude, both zealous and merely tolerant, both curious and indifferent, called humanism—which found slums the most enthralling of decors.”

Sontag’s conception of humanism in “Melancholy Objects” is vital to her discussion of Whitman’s “euphoric humanism.” Sontag considers humanism an extension of the classist interests of middle-class people—an extension of the colonial attitudes of the middle class.

“The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is a machine.”

A taste for machines exemplifies the alienation in US society that fuels the desire for cameras. Sontag juxtaposes diametrically opposed words (“loots” and “preserves,” “denounces” and “consecrates”) to show the difficulty of making meaning through photography. In addition, this language aligns photographs with museums.

“[Berenice Abbott’s photographs are] not so much memorializing the past as simply documenting ten years of the chronic self-destruct quality of American experience, in which even the recent past is constantly being used up, swept away, torn down, thrown out, traded in. Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans—the used things, warm with generations of human touch […]. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.”

The rampant consumerism of postwar America led to a massive cannibalization of architecture, culture, and landscape to make way for the space-age consumer goods that made American an economic superpower. Sontag imagines photography as a surface-level bandage for the loss of the past.

“[One] of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy of turning living beings into things, things into living beings.”

Sontag uses antimetabole, a literary device that emphasizes the connection between antithetical concepts and weakens the divide between them. Here, antimetabole highlights the appropriating force of photography, which turns people into objects to consume.

“Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant detail, addicted to incongruity. But photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision.”

Photography paradoxically defines “ordinary vision” while constantly violating this boundary in order to maintain its prestige. This cycle of pushing boundaries is in itself a habit that modern society sees as the “default” relationship to vision.

“A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen […]. As Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use—so for each photograph. And it is in this way that the presence and proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of the very notion of meaning, to that parceling out of the truth into relative truths which is taken for granted by the modern liberal consciousness.”

One of Sontag’s central assertions is that a photograph carries no inherent meaning; rather, its meaning is determined by context, such as its use in montage or the use of a caption. Sontag believes that this relativization of truth is central to modern politics: Every truth must be contextually sensitive.

“Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle. As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions. Photography’s realism creates a confusion about reality which is (in the long run) analgesic morally as well as (both in the long and in the short run) sensorially stimulating. Hence, it clears our eyes. This is the fresh vision everyone has been talking about.”

The contradictory nature of photography to elicit feelings while creating emotional distance contributes to the erosion of meaning, which in turn allows people to turn history into a consumerist object, into spectacle (see: Index of Terms). Most uses of “spectacle” in On Photography refer to Debord’s conception of spectacle.

“All that photography’s program of realism actually implies is the belief that reality is hidden. And, being hidden, is something to be unveiled. Whatever the camera records is a disclosure […]. Just to show something, anything, in the photographic view is to show that it is hidden.”

Photography’s “realism” is an obfuscation tactic. Photography relies on the belief that reality is hidden yet also proclaims itself an unbiased medium for replicating reality. The paradoxical strain of photography’s realism is evidence for Sontag’s thesis that photography is a medium like language and not an art form.

“Photography is the most successful vehicle of modernist taste in its pop version, with its zeal for debunking the high culture of the past […], its skill in reconciling avant-garde ambitions with the rewards of commercialism; its pseudo-radical patronizing of art as reactionary […], its transformation of art into cultural document.”

Photography is a kind of false-populist form of appeal that becomes art by tearing down art. Sontag uses emphasis and repetition to reiterate this point in several different ways.

“As photography takes the whole world as its subject, there is room for every kind of taste.”

Photography’s democratizing impulse means that it can be consumed by every different community and thus generate more profit. Photography’s wide appeal directly relates to Sontag’s conclusion that a consumerist society requires photography.

“It is inevitable that more and more art will be designed to end as photographs. A modernist would have to rewrite Pater’s dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music. Now all art aspires to the condition of photography.”

Walter Pater (1839-1894) was a Victorian art critic and philosopher who believed that music was pre-linguistic and the source of all arts. His theory that music predated language indicates a belief that music was closer to pure sensorial experience. Photography shifts this privilege from listening to vision and values photographic vision as the purest form of art.

“[A] society becomes ‘modern’ when one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images, when images that have extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality and are themselves coveted substitutes for firsthand experience become indispensable to the health of the economy, the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness.”

On Photography is partly an exploration of what separates modern industrial society’s cultures from those that preceded them. Sontag pinpoints the change in consumer habits: Whereas most before built their identities around what they did, now many people center their lives on what they consume. Photography’s ability to sell sanitized packages of experience makes it an incredibly useful tool in a society based on consumption.

“Our irrepressible feeling that the photographic process is something magical has a genuine basis. No one takes an easel painting to be in any sense co-substantial with its subject; it only represents or refers. But a photograph is not only like its subject, a homage to the subject. It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it.”

Sontag believes that photographs are an extension of a fundamental quasi-magical relationship to images that human behavior reflects. Where photography differs from statues and paintings is its unprecedented ability for endless replication with almost no material costs.

“Through being photographed, something becomes part of a system of information, fitted into schemes of classification and storage […]. Photographs do more than redefine the stuff of ordinary experience […] and add vast amounts of material that we never see at all. Reality as such is redefined—as an item for exhibition, as a record for scrutiny, as a target for surveillance. The photographic exploration and duplication of the world fragments continuities and feeds the pieces into an interminable dossier, thereby providing possibilities of control that could not even be dreamed of under the earlier system of recording information: writing.”

Photographs make everything into discrete objects to experience—objects perfect for scrutinizing, surveillance, and controlling. Sontag’s notion that photographs break up reality into bite-sized chunks is a central premise in many of her assertions.

“The feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt. Partly it is because one is ‘here,’ not ‘there,’ and partly it is the character of inevitability that all things acquire when they are transmuted into images. 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.”

Sontag theorizes that the image-world is a means of soothing anxiety in an industrial society. She views the US as a place of great upheaval, economic and political uncertainty, and colonial repression. The image-world offers people a sense of control over their lives that they don’t have in reality. For Sontag, this is the primary reason that photography has become so ubiquitous.

“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. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).”

Sontag views the camera as the central mechanism for a consumerist society: Without cameras and the endless replicability of images, it would be impossible for the wealthy to profit from endless streams of entertainment as they do today. In Sontag’s view, entertainment produced by cameras is the central force in the US economy, which makes it the central pillar of society.