Politics & Power Quote by Susan Sontag

America likes to pretend it runs on facts, but Sontag is needling the national habit of mistaking images for evidence. Her line turns the photographer from neutral witness into active architect, a provocation aimed at the country's deep faith in visual proof: if you can see it, it must have happened. She’s arguing the opposite. Photographs don’t just preserve history; they decide what counts as history in the first place.

The verb invents is doing the real work. It suggests selection, staging, and the quiet violence of exclusion: what falls outside the frame becomes culturally disposable. In the American context - a media ecosystem built on spectacle, celebrity, war reporting, and advertising - the camera doesn’t simply document events; it manufactures the memory of them, then sells that memory back as shared reality. That’s why this lands less like a technical observation than a critique of power. Whoever controls images controls the story of the nation: which faces become icons, which tragedies become shorthand, which conflicts are made legible as heroism or chaos.

Sontag’s broader project, especially in On Photography, is to expose the moral slippage that comes with constant looking. The camera can create empathy, but it can also anesthetize, turning suffering into content. Her subtext is grimly modern: the past isn’t what happened; it’s what got photographed, circulated, and remembered. In a country that loves reinvention, even history becomes a kind of production.