On Photography

Sontag turns to analyzing photography’s relationship with American cultural ideals. She turns to Walt Whitman, one of the foundational figures of American poetry and a “euphoric humanist” who viewed the US as a beacon of humanity’s unified future. Sontag believes that Americans’ use of photography is the logical endpoint of Whitman’s dream, with an ironic twist. American photography focuses on the banal, mundane, and “ugly.” Photography democratizes and allows everyone in the US to share in the essence of being a celebrity because the camera’s gaze dignifies any subject. Sontag continues her exploration of Arbus’s work and positions Arbus as a paradoxical dissolution and continuation of Whitman’s ideals.

Whitman wanted to see America as a single united entity while Arbus’s work dissolves the idea that America is unified. Arbus photographed a hodgepodge of marginalized people who had almost nothing in common. Sontag notes that Arbus’s photography relies on the assumption that her viewers differ from her subjects; if her audience were the same as the people she photographed, they’d have little interest in her work. The people she photographed wouldn’t see themselves as scandalous, provocative images to ponder. Arbus’s presumed audience is people from middle-class and normative backgrounds like herself.