On Photography

In On Photography, Susan Sontag presents the hobby of taking photographs as a practice with deep cultural and sociological implications. Particularly, Sontag analyzes the morality of photography under sexual, psychological, and physical contexts. In doing so, Sontag raises points about photography that most people would never have even thought. Ultimately, I think Sontag's arguments about photography can be linked in parallel to the minds behind modern advertising.

On Photography begins by critiquing photographs as "more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow." At first it details paintings and other succinct visual forms of art as things with "essential quality" whereas a photograph is "a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality." She thus implies that essential quality pertains to an ability to incite different interpretations among different people. Other visual mediums give people more to imagine because it is an image that comes purely out of a painter's/artist's mind, whereas a photograph is a representation of what the photographer wants viewers to see. As a result, photographs are more absolute and concrete than other forms of art. Thus, they are much easier to remember because the viewer has to see everything in the photograph to understand it, but a painting viewer chooses what he sees in it.

While the viewer of a photograph is limited in the ways he can imagine it, the actual photographer has just the opposite. Unlike the viewer, the photographer actually experiences his photographs. The photographer chooses what he wishes to capture. In a world of mass production, the camera salesmen insist that photography "demands no skill or expert knowledge...the machine is all knowing..." Due in part to this, photograph viewers are generally desensitized to the meaning and experience the photographer had in order to take the photograph. Sontag finally makes the statement that the event of the photograph must be "named and characterized...[and] the [social] contribution of photography always follows the naming of the event." This statement only supports the idea that unlike any other form of art, photographs cannot evoke any response from their viewers although it is a representation of the photographer's thought.

Therefore, a photographer has the sole power of molding public opinion about his photographs. In its beginning, photography and all art acted as "an instrument of identification with the community and [aggrandization] of the artist as a heroic, romantic, and self-expressing ego." I think this idea ties really well with the motives of modern advertising. In the case of advertising, the advertiser is the artist, deciding what he wants the public to see about the particular point of interest. Advertising thus is not a representation of the whole context and truth. Similarly, photography is also not the whole truth because it is only one moment out of many, and does not establish context. At their best, both forms of media would make their own statements by themselves. Instead, other forces of culture and society have suppressed the power of both. Ultimately, Sontag laments that "the best of American photography has given itself over..." In all, I think Sontag makes a detailed and coherent critique of photography through her book.