Time & Perspective Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag is needling photography for its quiet imperialism: the camera doesn’t just record the world, it domesticates it. “Imaginary possession” is a deliberately provocative phrase, collapsing sentimentality and ownership into the same impulse. A photograph feels like proof that something happened, that you were there, that a moment is safely stored. But for Sontag, that safety is counterfeit. The past a photo offers is “unreal” not because the scene didn’t exist, but because the image substitutes for experience, flattening mess and ambiguity into a neat, portable artifact.

The second clause sharpens the critique: photographs “help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.” This is the tourist’s reflex, the anxious flurry of snapshots in unfamiliar streets, museums, disasters, even other people’s suffering. When you don’t understand a place, you can still capture it. The shutter becomes a small act of control, a way to turn estrangement into a collection. You don’t have to be fluent in the culture or the moment; you just have to frame it.

Written in the context of Sontag’s broader suspicion of images as instruments of power and consumption, the line anticipates today’s feed-based life with eerie precision. The insecurity she points to isn’t only geographic; it’s social and existential. We photograph to reassure ourselves we belong, that our lives are legible, that the world won’t slip away. The subtext is unsparing: the more frantic the documentation, the less secure the living.