On Photography – 50 Years Later

It’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of US author Susan Sontag‘s essay Photography (link to PDF) which was later re-edited and renamed “In Plato’s Cave.” This renamed essay became the first of six essays in her book, “On Photography.” In Plato’s Cave is probably the most well known of the six essays.

The book discusses the role and influence of photography on society.

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. They are grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

– In Plato’s Cave, Susan Sontag

I first read the book in the late 1980s, just as I was starting in photography. Back then, the book made no sense to me. I just reread the book and now, after 35 years in photography, I understand the essays much more than I did decades ago.

The first essay was published in 1973 and the book in 1977, long before the World Wide Web, Photoshop, and cellphones with cameras. Yet her essays still ring true today.

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

– In Plato’s Cave, Susan Sontag

The last few paragraphs of the last essay in the book, On Photography, include:

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 the masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires unlimited production and consumption of images.

The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. 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. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first, because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second, because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion. Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to “fix” the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate and (. . .) images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and the means of making it obsolete.

– The Image-World, Susan Sontag

On Photography is a worthwhile read for photographers. You may not agree with everything she wrote but it will make you think differently about photography.