Susan Sontag, <On Photography>
Analytical essay
Sontag, in her essay On Photography, argues that photography “democratizes” (7) all experiences. In other words, the act of taking a photograph squeezes different events into a uniformed format of a slim, square piece. She provides four grounds supporting her claim: industrialization, family photo as a routine procedure, travel photography as an ostentatious souvenir, and a new way of experiencing things provided by LEICA advertisement.
Industrialization is one of the primary cause that made it possible for the camera become a widespread device which converts experiences into photography. When the camera was an expensive toy for the rich, there was “no clear social use” (8) in taking photographs. When photography became available to the public by mass production after industrialization, it began to earn its social significance and a device to record daily lives.
Family photography is one of her ground for the claim that photography equalizes experience. Photography has become a visual effort to rebuild endangered “connectedness” (9) within a family. People use photography to show that their families fit into idealized image of a ‘family’. Families who want to recover their connectedness, or at least want to believe so, would take a family photo which functions as an appeasement for the lack of intimacy. Regardless of its own history and characteristic, the family is standardized into a typical figure in which its members are gathered in an awkward smile. Now a photography has become a banal proof to demonstrate its owner’s care for his or her loved ones.
Traveling, another ground offered by Sontag, shows how photography shapes ordinary experiences. Photography became a “souvenir” (9) due to its trait of permanence and solidity. To refine their experience into meaningful souvenir, travelers carefully choose what to take or not when they photograph. In this process, they implicitly classify and differentiate what is worth being recorded. The format of a travel is generalized; it becomes a series of ‘hop-on-and-hop-off’ to famous places where the tourist can take pictures and show off that they were there. The experiences of traveling are equalized into miscellaneous trophies of exotic landscape in small rectangular papers. Both the experience itself and the way of remembering it are democratized in a travel photo.
In the LEICA advertisement, Sontag refers to the role of photography as a proof of “an appearance of participation” (10). The advertisement copy unifies distinct places into “an Event: something worth seeing – and therefore worth photographing” (11). In this context, recording oneself involving in certain event is more important than experiencing it. People define how meaningful an experience is by deciding to take photograph or not. If an event is photographed, then it is perceived as more important one than the other events. As a result, people fail to concentrate on the experience itself when obsessed with taking pictures. Their experiences are democratized and stored in the same form wherever they visit or whatever they do.
What is important in Sontag’s assertion is that it reveals a unique characteristic of the photography as the most recent genre of art. The photography seems to stick to the principal of “non-intervention” (11) as it creates the exact reproduction of an event. However, there is “an aggression implicit in every use of the camera” (7) because people inevitably infuse their interpretation into it from the very start. In the frame of camera, previously ‘seen’ objects are transformed into ‘taken’ objects with certain aim. Photography is not merely a reflection of reality; it is a virtual reality carved by the photographer.
Works Cited
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
2017 Freshmen Writing Intensive Seminar
