To believe something is true, what is
the best way to portray it than by using visuals. Photographs is one of the
best medium of doing so. On
Photography was published in 1977 as a collection of
essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New
York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book, Sontag discusses her
opinions on the development of photography and its current function in
capitalist society as of the 1970s.
She starts the essay by saying, ‘To collect photographs is to collect the world.’ Ever since the beginning of time, reality has been communicated through images, and philosophers like Plato have worked to reduce this dependency by emphasizing more direct methods of understanding reality. She believes that photographs are the experiences that are captured by the camera which is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
According to Sontag, photography is generally accepted in today's culture, which is continually making and consuming images to the point that it has become crucial to both the strength of the economy and the stability of social systems. Susan Sontag asserts that photography has an almost limitless amount of influence in contemporary life. Due to the fact that they are not only a reflection or interpretation of reality, but also an actual remnant of it, such photographic images have the power to replace it. Photographs are not merely the imitation or representation of the object, but it is the direct extension of the object, it is a part of the object.
Photography only began to flourish as art after it became industrialized. Industrialization gave photographers new social uses for their work, and the backlash against those uses increased photography's self-consciousness as art. In recent years, photography has almost reached the same level of popularity as sex and dance as a kind of entertainment. As with all mass art forms, most individuals do not engage in photography as an artistic endeavor. It serves primarily as a social ritual, an anxiety defense, and a weapon.
Sontag believes that photography is a technique for freezing reality, which is thought to be unattainable. Reality is impossible to hold, but a snapshot is. With photographic images becoming more and more common in contemporary society, photography serves as a means of handling the present as well as conserving the past. The purity and openness of the way we perceive reality are diminished by photography, which also allows us to see something before experiencing it. In other words, reality is captured on camera before it is experienced.
Let us take the example of today’s world. With the
advancement of technology and social media, everyone is continuously on their
phones. When there is an unusual event that happens in one’s life, before even
capturing it with their eyes, people immediately try to freeze this moment with
their cameras; the camera captures it before it is experienced as mentioned
above. People relive this moment with the photograph they have taken in the
future. The photograph like Sontag said, ‘They age,
plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become
valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced.’
The photograph taken further becomes a component of a particular knowledge system that has been altered to meet classification and storage schemes, which can include images from the family album and images from the fields of science, politics, and law. In other words, surveillance includes photography.
According to Susan Sontag, photography is a recycled version of reality rather than just a simple copy. Because we consume photos at an exponentially growing rate, they must be replaced; the more we take photographs the more is the need to take photographs, and this accounts for what is known today as the "pictorial turn".
Sontag’s views are very relevant in today’s modern society.
Every household has a camera, especially when there are children. Having a
camera has turned an individual into something active and voyeur.
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