Notes on Susan Sontag, On Photography

A review.

Photographs do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality, that anyone can make or acquire.

as a mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power

The industrialization of photography permitted its rapid absorption into rational—that is, bureaucratic—ways of running society. …photographs became part of the general furniture of the environment---touchstones and confirmations of that reductive approach to reality which is considered realistic

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.


As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

To photograph is to confer importance.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.