If you have any interest in photography you must read Susan Sontag’s book. The six essays were originally published from 1973 to 1977 in The New York Review of Books, but they are more interesting when read as consecutive chapters. It is fascinating to watch Sontag’s well-honed intelligence trying to make sense out of the seemingly “simple and mechanical” medium of photography. There are lots of false starts and contradictions between essays, but that is the fun of it. Sontag must have written a hundred sentences beginning “Photography is...” before she got it right: “... photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.” Books on photography aren’t supposed to win the National Book Award, but this one did.
In these last decades, “concerned” photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.
The lure of photographs, their hold on us, is that they offer at one and the same time a connoisseur’s relation to the world and a promiscuous acceptance of the world.
While paintings or poems do not get better, more attractive simply because they are older,all photographs are Interesting as well as touching if they are old enough.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
