Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying the truth.
It would not be wrong of speaking of people having a
compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form.
Photographs can and do distress, but the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it.
Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.
The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more like to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan.
If photographs are our connection to the past, it’s a very peculiar, fragile, sentimental connection. You take a photograph before you destroy something. The photograph is its posthumous existence.
