Analysis of "on photography" by Susan Sontag

 
On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It is a series of essays in the New York Review of books between 1973 and 1977. Susan Sontag expresses several views and ideas about photography to educate us further about her views. In Sontag's view, "to collect photography is to collect the world". Sontag says the man has developed dependence on photography for the sake of the mere ability to experience something that has meaning. By converting the experience into an image photography gives shape, and time, to the transient experience. In other words, we need the camera in order to realize and substantiate our experiences. 

But though photography capture a moment and gives it meaning, its power is not constant. Repetition of images, be it horror or pornography, takes the edge off their affective capacities and the event becomes less real.
While it’s true that the world is progressing more towards the “image-world” as Sontag describes it, it is inevitable to argue that imagery plays a huge role in today’s world. Sontag offers a much more radical approach towards society’s consumption of images, which is further evident by her comparison of photography to rape. Her words here tend to contradict as she explains the necessity of conserving images, but fails to offer a solution to it. To delve deeper into Sontag’s jargon, consider her assertion of photography’s inherent violence. For Sontag to “photograph people is to violate them, see them as they never see themselves,” this creates a form of imprisonment where the victim, the photographed is in total control of the photographer. The camera acts as a gun, not to kill but hold power over the individual and present them in a demeaning manner. Violence of this type is most evident in the media who hover like vultures seeking its prey. Sontag’s statement that “cameras are fantasy-machines” applies to this scenario in the aspect that the “fantasy” is the photographer’s intentions and how they use the image.
It’s hard to accept a fact that an image can hold power, but more so the revelation that it’s a form of occupancy. Therefore, the use of a camera is addictive and perverse, however my statement would insight disagreement from Sontag as well as Roland Barthes who might explain that through imagery we create a fantasy, a right everyone holds to explain that which is before their eyes because “photographs cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy”. A photo being an image of still reality creates a unique effect, perception. In “The Heroism of Vision” Sontag discusses the relationship between beauty in truth and its impact on photographic history. She holds that photography is meant to find beauty in the world and capture it. For example a beautiful photo of a sunset makes an actual sunset banal, why search and wait for a sunset when it can be seen whenever you want. This heightens Sontag’s claim that the act of taking photographs replaces an actual experience by creating an illusion that distorts reality through nostalgia. In other words, a fantasy world that gives the viewer a sense of participation of what was once reality.
This arbitrary relationship sets up a “chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events”. The photographer is habitually removed from the world, but still feels a false sense of familiarization and participation in a world full of deja vu. Beauty as seen today is in a state of confusion due to the progression of technology. The camera can now lie, cheat, and deceive those mesmerized by its use. Humans now hold the power to use photography to forge a reality to suit their own aesthetics. Giving photography the ability to document its own vision of imagery and thus reconcile the truth with the need for beauty. Photography has made a huge impact on the world around us. It has become a way of connecting others through the internet and expressing oneself. Modern technologies combine with everyday trends to create a new outlook and revolutionize it. An example of this would be “selfies” the term young adults have come up with to describe the act of holding a cellphone in front of oneself and capturing everything from the head to shoulders A simple act that has recently become the decor of society. Photographs serve a variety of purposes, mostly being a way to hold memories in physical form, but it is through exploitation that sullies photography and those fully devoted to its use. Cameras are a form of imagination allowing one to glorify its use by revealing spectacles missed by other and allowing them to experience the same joy felt by the photographer. Photography, according to Sontag is not simply a copy of reality, but rather the embodiment of a person’s memories and experience.
Photography has become a medium through which people express their ideas, thoughts, and happiness. With a single look, you are brought back to the past and are allowed to relive it. Photography is not an art, but has the capacity of turning everything it captures into art. The more you look at photographs, the more you become inspired to take them. A revelation of Sontag’s statement that photography is becoming ever more institutionalized, but more so addicting. Though addiction is a small price to pay for, after all the camera allows you to recreate a world as you see fit.

collection photographs, Sontag argues, is in a sense collection to world. photographs are artifacts which create and condense the environment that we perceive to be modern. she argues that photographing something is gaining ownership of it and creating a kind of  knowledge like relation to the world. photography creates a miniature representation of parts of the visible world that any one can obtain as their own. photographs are a kind of proofs, a testimony and for this reason they are so important for bureaucracy and are an instrument of control with the capacity to convict and equate. But photography for  Sontag is always an interpretation of the world and this interpretation be it on the side of the photographer of the person viewing the photograph, is always ruled by conventions, ideology and the zeitgeist. photograph always inevitable, impose their mown preference on their product merely by choosing where they point their camera and how they point it.
A photograph is an event which lingers to, in principle, eternity. It is a way of participating in an event without being a part of it. Sontag sees the camera and a kind of sublimated weapon, and the act of photographing as symbolic shooting, or even raping. Sontag compare photography with rape because in photography we see people in a manner unavailable to themselves and we gain knowledge of them which can never be theirs, and thus photography reifies people into objects which can be subjected to symbolic ownership. Photography for Sontag is also a form of nostalgia, an attempt to connect with a passing reality and to gain custody of it. Photography grant meaning to the moment, and as Sontag argues, a photographed moment is a privileged moment which was chosen for cultural reasons. Photography turns a moment into an event, because an event is something that is worth photographing, but it ideology which decides what's worth the film.
in addition, Sontag divides photography into a positive and negative force, one that falls in our control, while the other vanishes from sight. She believes that society becomes obsessed with capturing the moment, a form nihilism that seeks to discard the present and reject the notion of time. Therefore, Sontag perceives “cameras [as] the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete”. This leads to her fear that the future might compromise of an excessive amount of consumption of images which will lead towards the exhaustion of reality.