Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of diverse communities that have use for it.
Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image.
The image-surfeited are likely to find sunsets corny; they now look, alas, too much like photographs.
Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.
(On seeing photographs of the Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps.)
To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency in all photographs to accord value to their subjects.
An unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art photographs.
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing has happened. The picture may distort; but there’s always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.
The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightening time.
