Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings… In these last decades, “concerned” photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable—that is, unforgettable.
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
It’s not like painting; you know where the paintings are—they’re in museums and galleries and if you want to go that’s a special experience; you go to it, so to speak. But photographs come to you because they’re all over the place.
The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear. The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences, to find new ways of looking at familiar subjects—to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
The camera defines for us what we allow to be “real”—and it continually pushes forward the boundary of the real.
The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up—and therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the camera falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust.
Being modern (and if we have the habit of looking at photographs, we are by definition modern), we understand all identities to be constructions. The only irrefutable reality—and our best clue to identity—is how people appear.
