Susan Sontag On photography

On photography is a book written by Susan Sontag, in the book she writes about her interpretations as to what photography is, and what it means.

Sontag starts by saying how she sees photographers as "enlarging and altering what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe" she says that photographers are a "grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. by this I feel she is putting a photographer almost on a pedestal above the rest of what is deemed to be the average person, although I could be interpreting this wrong.

Sontag comments on how we like to collect the world through photographs because they are "lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. i would agree that this probably was the case when the book was first published in 1977 however now because of the way technology photographs are less physical and more like the films she described and lights that flicker on the wall, and disappear without power, they lack physicality.

"Photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are" i guess the easiest way to explain this is, that the photographer only photographs what they want someone to see, it is their own interpretation of the world through a lens, especially now in the age of computers, not only do we photograph what we want to photograph, but we also edit them, to make them look how we want them to look. This comes back to the hyperreal and making something over perfect.

"Recently, Photography has become also as widely practiced as sex and dancing - which means that, like every 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."
I would say that this quote is more true now than it ever has been. a huge number of people have smartphones, all of which can take photographs, which we upload to social media, "facebook" "instagram" and "snapchat" because it is the social norm "the done thing". nearly all of these photos are just mundane photographs with limited though behind them.