Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag is doing that signature move of hers: taking what sounds like a casual provocation and using it to smuggle in a whole philosophy of looking. Saying there is "no such thing as a bad photograph" isn’t a kumbaya defense of everyone’s camera roll; it’s an attack on the idea that photography can be judged like painting, by some stable standard of craft or beauty. In a medium that mechanically captures whatever is put in front of it, "bad" often just means culturally inconvenient, emotionally flat, or contextless.

The pivot is the real point: "less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious". Those aren’t technical criteria, they’re social and psychological ones. Interest is about the viewer’s appetite, relevance is about the moment’s politics, mystery is about what the image refuses to resolve. Sontag is arguing that photographs don’t simply depict reality; they compete for attention and meaning inside a marketplace of images. The worst sin isn’t blur or poor exposure, it’s having nothing at stake.

The subtext is slightly unsettling: if the value of a photograph is determined by interest and relevance, then our standards are porous, opportunistic, even predatory. A photo of suffering can become "good" because it is compelling, not because it is ethical. That tension sits at the core of Sontag’s work on photography: images democratize seeing while also training us to consume the world as spectacle. Her line lands because it flatters the medium’s endless fertility while quietly indicting our reasons for wanting to look.