Reflecting on the messages of this book can make us more aware of how we actively play into the endlessly growing global archive of images. We are currently consuming exponentially more images than people were when On Photography was published, and so her commentary has become even more relevant with each decade since it was written. This is where we must pay close attention to Sontag’s observations as we “collect the world,” as we spread and consume photographs. “It confirms your connection to places and objects once distant and remote, making the world slightly smaller and less alienating.” This idea of familiarity through consuming photographs is a theme explored extensively throughout the book. “To collect photographs is to collect the world,” she wrote. Sontag writes that “Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism.”įurthermore, Sontag argues that the people of the late 1970s - the society she was observing - go as far as to prefer photographs to firsthand experiences. She argues that the quintessential nature of photographs is that they derive directly from reality such that they hold a certain authority, a certain sense of “realness” that works in other media, such as paintings, do not.

Much of Sontag’s writing in On Photography revolves around the power wielded by photographs. Sontag (1933-2004) wrote of the effects of mass-imagery consumption before the Internet was even fathomable, yet her observations have proven to be more relevant than ever. So how could the massive media consumption of the present day possibly compare to that in say, 1977? This question comes to mind when reflecting upon and being astonished at the parallels found in Susan Sontag’s collection of essays published that year, On Photography. The World Wide Web was released to the public in 1991. Google was founded in 1998, and Yahoo and Amazon both launched in 1994. The iPod Classic that gave rise to that iPhone debuted in October, 2001. Facebook was founded in February of 2004. The inaugural iPhone was released in June of 2007.

Susan sontag on photography book