Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Though photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, free-standing particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.
In some way I would suggest that photography is not so much an art as a meta-art. It’s an art which devours other art... photography takes the whole world as its subject, cannibalizes all art forms, and converts them into images. And in that sense it seems a peculiarly modern art form.
The vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images.
To collect photography is to collect the world.
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.
Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
