On Photography

“In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”

Sontag’s use of “grammar” and “ethics” in characterizing photography foreshadows her conclusion that it’s a medium like language and has its own laws of grammar and ethics. Sontag’s conception of photography as a language is foundational to the assertions she makes throughout her essays.

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. […] Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture.”

The camera creates literal and metaphorical distance between subjects and their surroundings or experiences. Sontag theorizes that people consume cameras, like cars or guns, as a tool for power fantasies that help consumers master situations.

“To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a ‘good’ picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.”

Sontag views photographers as inherently passive observers. To take a candid photograph means to make a conscious decision to not intervene in a situation or change the circumstances that one is photographing. For Sontag, this is most relevant in photojournalism like war photography or photographs of accident scenes. Sontag’s photographer acts as an agent of the status quo and reinforces sentiment around it.