By 1903, they were announcing that “a vacation without a Kodak is a vacation wasted”.Ī way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. “Take a Kodak with you” was one of the company’s earliest slogans. Kodak’s marketing through the early 20th century testifies to this urge. Photography is a way of testifying I saw this, I was there. So we grab and run.Įven if we compose carefully, if we “make” rather than “take” a photograph, we are likely to feel the release of the shutter as the release of a bond, as if we now can (or must) move on – to other photographs. There is no need to experience something now, as we can always review it later. Having taken a photograph, we think of its subject as our captive: it’s there now, on the film, in the camera’s memory. According to Sontag, photography gives the tourist’s experience a definite structure: “stop, take a photograph, and move on.” Tourists use their cameras as shields between themselves and whatever they encounter. Taking a photograph becomes a way of attenuating the otherness of a place, holding it at a distance. Sontag claimed that we photograph most when we feel most insecure, particularly when we are in an unfamiliar place where we don’t know how to react or what is expected of us. Confronted with the chaotic surfeit of sensation, we retreat behind the protection of the camera, whose one-eyed, one-sensed perspective makes the world seem maniable. She saw that it had become a coping mechanism. Sontag described photography as “a defense against anxiety”.
It ranges over artistic, commercial, photojournalistic, and popular uses of photography and it discusses the photograph’s role in both sensitising and desensitising us to other people’s suffering – a theme Sontag reconsidered 30 years later in her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others.īut perhaps nowhere is Sontag’s enduring relevance as a critic clearer than in the essay’s analysis of photography as both a symptom and a source of our pathological relationship to reality. Slightly edited and renamed In Plato’s Cave, it would become the first essay in her collection On Photography, which has never been out of print. This year marks 50 years since Susan Sontag’s essay Photography was published in the New York Review of Books.
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