Cynthia Clifford

Finished reading: On Photography by Susan Sontag 📚

What a brutal criticism on photography.

I don’t think Susan Sontag would have had an Instagram, to say the least.

I agreed with a lot of her diagnosis of society’s relationship to the photograph and the camera: the way images can turn the world into something to be collected and consumed, how they push us toward spectatorship instead of action, and how easily they plug into surveillance, control, and commodified experience. But my problem starts when she absolutizes those insights.

Sontag’s moral positioning against photographers, sentimentality, art movements, and pretty much anyone who has ever been interested in taking a photo feels at points insufferable and, ironically, distant from reality. To morally reject all photography, surrealism (yep, that means Picasso), and Joseph Cornell (who doesn’t like Cornell boxes?!) on the grounds of their supposed lack of realism, which she seems to treat as the pinnacle, is a bold move. She fights hard for that stance with sharp articulation, extensive research, and genuinely lovely prose, but it still reads as an overreach.

However, some of the theories she puts forward really do shade in the non‑reality internet world we find ourselves in now, where so much of life is filtered through screens and feeds. Still, I’m not persuaded that her critique moves me enough to give up my film camera, or to treat every vacation snapshot—or every new parent taking another photo of their baby—as a moral or societal failure. Those photos can also simply be about care, memory, and connection, not just appropriation.

I’ve noticed recently (and share) a growing hostility toward the photograph, driven by privacy concerns around AI and the fallout of living in a social‑media and ad‑saturated culture. That’s where Sontag’s idea of an “image world” that hollows out experience feels newly useful. I will certainly be thinking about this book for awhile.

Some 💬 thoughtful quotes:

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still.”

“Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, it’s main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without -walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation.”

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. The lure of photographs, their hold on us, is that they offer at one and the same time a connoisseur’s relation to the world and a promiscuous acceptance of the world.”

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

“As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure. Thus, photograph develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.”

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge–and therefore, like power.”