On Photography by Susan Sontag

On Photography

Susan Sontag’s essay, “On Photography” explains how photography is the most real and unobstructed form of art. Sontag also explains how photography isn’t just an art form, but a way of life, in the way that people like to keep evidence of everyday life and grand events. She lays out the ways that everyone has the same practice in American culture of keeping photographic evidence of graduations, birthdays, and weddings. Sontag says that “photographs furnish evidence”, evidence of every day acts, to breaking news. Photographs have been used to prove facts or dissolve myths, due to their “narrowly selective transparency”. Other art forms can fabricate reality and change the environment to make the image what they want it to be. Though Sontag brings up that we do have Photoshop to create idealized images, often found in magazines and fashion articles, she also says that those photos “are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness”. Sontag seems to organize how every photo has its place in the world.

Sontag’s writing lays out the basic understanding of photography, and how it interconnects between art, life and culture. Reading Sontag’s article brings light to what has been commonly understood throughout American culture, and what’s not often challenged.

It’s interesting seeing how a relatively new technology has dominated cultures around the world, and has founded the way people look at the world. We all look at photographs on walls and in magazines and see truth, there seems to not be a whole lot to challenge. Every single day a person sees hundreds upon thousands of photographs, and we’ve been taught to habitually look at the images and not take a step back to really look at what we’re seeing.

As Americans, we have also created a habit of photographing everything we see and find interesting, creating a catalog of daily images. As a privileged culture we have photography at out fingertips, not only with digital cameras, but also with camera-phones, social media and photo albums. If anyone wants to see another part of the world, all they need to do is look it up in National Geographic, or Google it. If anyone wants to go back in time and look at something from the 1950s, it’s as simple as looking in a history book. Photographing life is the most unobstructed ways to document real-time, real-life, unlike the previous art forms. Though we have Photoshop and other photo-alteration programs, photography is the closest we have to 2-D reality, and the closest thing to tangible memories. Photos can be reproduced over and over and over, creating a sense of indestructability.

When one photographs a special event, the real world, or captures a fleeting moment, we establish and freeze time forever, never to happen again.