"The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own"
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Sontag lands a quiet accusation: photography doesn’t just record experience, it reorganizes it into something consumable. Calling us “tourist[s] in other people’s reality” frames the camera as a passport to scenes we haven’t earned - pain, intimacy, disaster, glamour - packaged into images we can take home without obligation. Tourism implies distance and entitlement: you look, you collect, you move on. The camera becomes a moral alibi, a way to participate while staying clean.
The twist is the second half: “and eventually in one’s own.” That’s the cultural gut punch. In a world saturated with images, we start staging our lives for the lens, pre-editing moments into future souvenirs. Memory gets outsourced to documentation; living becomes scouting for content. The self turns into a destination with a gift shop: you visit your own experiences as if they belong to a stranger.
This is classic Sontag: brisk, unsentimental, suspicious of the ways aesthetics can launder reality. In the context of her work on photography, she’s tracking how images don’t merely reflect the world; they train our desires and dull our responsiveness. The camera’s promise of access is also a mechanism of control: it flattens complexity into a frame, turning events into “pictures” and people into subjects. Her line reads even sharper now, in the era of constant self-documentation, when being present can feel like failing to capture proof that you were.
The twist is the second half: “and eventually in one’s own.” That’s the cultural gut punch. In a world saturated with images, we start staging our lives for the lens, pre-editing moments into future souvenirs. Memory gets outsourced to documentation; living becomes scouting for content. The self turns into a destination with a gift shop: you visit your own experiences as if they belong to a stranger.
This is classic Sontag: brisk, unsentimental, suspicious of the ways aesthetics can launder reality. In the context of her work on photography, she’s tracking how images don’t merely reflect the world; they train our desires and dull our responsiveness. The camera’s promise of access is also a mechanism of control: it flattens complexity into a frame, turning events into “pictures” and people into subjects. Her line reads even sharper now, in the era of constant self-documentation, when being present can feel like failing to capture proof that you were.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977), essay collection. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) |
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