Book: On Photography

Overview
Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) gathers six essays that chart photography’s emergence as a dominant way of seeing and possessing the world. Moving between philosophy, cultural history, and close readings of photographers and exhibitions, Sontag argues that the camera reshapes experience, ethics, and memory. Photography does not simply record reality; it produces an “image-world” that both reflects and reorganizes social life.

Photography and Reality
Opening with the allegory of the cave, Sontag contends that modern spectators learn about reality by consuming its shadows. To photograph is to appropriate. The act of taking a picture converts the world into a collection of images and the photographer into a hunter whose instrument resembles a gun. The camera confers importance, makes events feel more real, and encourages a stance of acquisitive spectatorship: travel becomes photo-tourism, experience is pursued in order to be photographed, and the world is solicited to pose.

Photographs seem factual because of their mechanical basis, yet every image is a fragment cut from context, shaped by framing, vantage, selection, and caption. That aura of truthfulness breeds authority while smuggling in choices and biases. Their stillness and portability let images detach from circumstances and circulate as tokens, deepening the gap between event and understanding.

Time, Melancholy, and the Aesthetic
Sontag stresses photography’s intimate tie to time and death. A photograph is a memento mori: it preserves a moment while declaring it irrevocably past. This melancholic pull encourages nostalgia and the fantasy of rescue through collecting. She contrasts traditions that celebrate the medium’s clarity and form, the “heroism of vision” in Stieglitz, Weston, and Strand, with an anti-aesthetic strain, indebted to Atget and the Surrealists, that embraces contingency, oddity, and the unconscious. Both tendencies claim truth; both aestheticize.

The book challenges the idea that documentary photography is transparent. Whether in the rhetoric of reform or the purity of form, photography interprets. Even the most neutral-seeming image depends on staging, timing, and distribution. The ethics of looking cannot be separated from the conventions that make images legible.

Suffering, Politics, and Indifference
Sontag probes the uses of photographs of pain, war, poverty, atrocity. Images can shock and mobilize, but repetition may breed numbness. She criticizes grand humanist displays like Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man for flattening history into sentiment and for dissolving political conflict into universal platitudes. Her reading of Diane Arbus is ambivalent: Arbus’s steady gaze at society’s margins democratizes attention, yet the cataloging of difference risks a leveling that turns subjects into specimens and viewers into voyeurs.

For Sontag, the camera is both instrument of conscience and agent of depoliticization. It can expose injustice, but it also turns events into spectacles and invites moral response to be discharged in the act of viewing.

Institutions, Uses, and Control
Photography operates across institutions, policing and identification, advertising and fashion, journalism and family life. It democratizes self-representation through the snapshot while expanding surveillance and standardization. The same technology that dignifies the ordinary also commodifies it; the same image that personalizes memory becomes fodder for marketing and state files.

The Image-World and Its Consequences
As images proliferate, they become a parallel environment that competes with and organizes experience. Reality is increasingly staged to be photographed; the authority of images displaces other forms of knowledge. Sontag ends by calling for an ecology of images, an ethic of production and consumption that checks saturation and restores discriminating attention. Written in a cool, aphoristic style, On Photography crystallizes a modern condition: a civilization illuminated, distracted, and haunted by its own pictures.