A Review On Photography by Susan Sontag: The Insertion of Photographs between Experience and Reality

Susan Sontag: Author, Philosopher

This essay is written by Susan Sontag, an American writer, philosopher, and political activist. She has also written multiple books and essays on modern culture. One of those essays is this essay- On Photography. 

This essay is a study of photographs and how they are constantly inserted between reality and experience. It also reminds us how photography has destroyed and rebounded the limitations and boundaries of art. 

This essay starts off with a quite simple yet striking sentence. 

"To collect photographs is to collect the world." While at first glance, this claim is rather mundane, it is only as one ventures further into the essay that one finds that this sentence has a depth that is initially unnoticed. Susan Sontag speaks of the practice and art of Photography, photographs themselves, and the implications of the power that come with being able to, in her words "collect the world." She also mentions the difference between other mimetic art styles and photography. She says that a written account of an event is simply an interpretation of the event by the writer. This stands for poetry or paintings. But in the case of photographs, she says that they are not statements about the world, rather they are pieces of it. She calls them "miniatures of reality. 

"While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency." She further explains that while photographs are simply pieces of reality, with a model present (the photographer imposes their standards on the model), the photograph is just as much of an interpretation as a painting or drawings are. Susan Sontag, in this essay, seems to have chosen every word with the most care to describe a medium as fluid and narrow as photography as accurately as this. 

The author very clearly blurs the lines between what photography as an art form and what it is to every other person that clicks photographs on their cameras. She completely changes every reader's perspective on everyday simple photography as well as professional photography. 

She speaks of documentation of life in this essay but also of how photographs furnish evidence. It is a carefully written essay with just as much diversity and color in the content as photography itself holds. She also in her final words in the essay speaks of how photographing an event is also participation. 

Much like sexual voyeurism, she says, by photographing an event we participate in the event and also encourage it go on. For an essay written almost 3 decades ago (along with the book), the essay covers a very modern understanding of photography as an art medium that is honestly ahead of its time. 

No doubt it is a slightly back-bending essay to read because of the writing style. But, after every paragraph, I found myself only wanting to read more.