On Photography

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1977

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“In Plato’s Cave”

“America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”

“Melancholy Objects”

“The Heroism of Vision”

“Photographic Evangels”

“The Image-World”

“A Brief Anthology of Quotations”

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Consumerism and Contemporary Life

On Photography is an exploration of industrial consumerist society and photography’s place in this socioeconomic structure. Sontag conducts this exploration through photography’s relationship with the idea of the spectacle (see: Index of Terms). Sontag theorizes that photography is one of the most easily accessible forms of surreal spectacle because of the ability to endlessly replicate photographs and film. Spectacle is central to the functioning of a hyper-consumerist society. In Sontag’s logic, photography is a central pillar of modern, hyper-consumerist society because of its ability to endlessly produce spectacles for consumption. Photography is essential to consumerism.

Sontag’s exploration of photography’s relationship to consumerism introduces her work in the first essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” and ends the collection in her concluding essay, “The Image-World.” This theme’s presence at the beginning and end of On Photography positions it as Sontag’s largest theoretical preoccupation. She writes:

Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photography the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. […] [Writing is a] now notorious first fall into alienation […] needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world […] than photographic images […] (1-2).

From the beginning, Sontag focuses on economies, the flow of goods, and the impact of photography’s cultural form on socioeconomic conditions. Sontag lists many of the photograph’s qualities that contribute to its place as a high-value commodity that generates profit: It’s cheap to make, is lightweight on logistics and transportation, and is easy to store. Many of Sontag’s more abstract artistic and literary critiques of photography eventually return to its relationship to consumerism. For example, she relates Diane Arbus’s interest in photographing impoverished and marginalized people to her upbringing in a “well-to-do” family (34). Sontag’s characterization of Arbus as a colonizing tourist is based partly on Arbus’s distinctly higher socioeconomic privilege compared to her subjects. Arbus illustrates how society licenses an upper-class individual to use a camera to tour worlds and communities that she doesn’t belong to in order to “pillage” cultural goods for people in her upper-class world. Sontag’s materialist approach casts socioeconomic conditions as the baseline that shapes everything else about a society. All the themes that Sontag explores in On Photography stem from her understanding of US socioeconomic conditions: Photography is a tool of surveillance for economic means, and art becomes a “cultural document” whose primary use is to generate profit (102). Sontag’s materialist, economically oriented theoretical framework is at the heart of her study on photography.

Art and Power Dynamics

Sontag’s materialist framework views art through the lens of economic concerns. The art world distinguishes between “high art” (such as Michelangelo’s paintings and Beethoven’s symphonies) and “low art” (folk songs, folk dances). “Low art” today is commonly referred to as “media” (photographs, television, film, video games, etc.). Sontag uses juxtaposition to illustrate the distinctions between low and high art: High art is “elitist” and discriminates between worthy and unworthy subjects; low art/media is “democratic” and regards “the whole world as material” (117). Sontag’s assertion that media is democratic contradicts her earlier statements that photography is a colonial, tourist force (33). The democratic nature of photography still exists in a society that enables upper-class individuals like Diane Arbus to make money from other people’s marginalization. An underlying assumption in On Photography is that the camera’s democratizing gaze doesn’t exist outside preexisting socioeconomic power imbalances. In its democratizing gaze, the camera thus becomes a kind of pillaging and looting force in the name of tearing down “high art” and making art accessible to everyone.

Sontag theorizes that the gaze of the camera reinforces the status quo under the guise of art. The high art of the past was produced by a single artisan and often involved a painstaking process to create a single original copy of an artwork, which acted as the artist’s interpretation of the world filtered through their biases. By contrast, the media of photography instantly captures snippets of reality and peddles these moments frozen in time as art. In “Photographic Evangels,” Sontag notes that photographers garner prestige by insisting that photography is a form of high art (89). By attempting to garner prestige from high art, the gaze of the camera lens is similar to the interpretative gaze of the classical high artists.

The camera’s gaze is an extension of a photographer’s gaze, which includes all of the photographer’s biases and inherited ideas about the world. Sontag believes that Arbus chose her subjects not only because of class differences but because she wanted to rebel against the sexually prudish and morally conservative upper-class world she grew up in. Arbus’s photography, however, assumes that the viewer is “normal” and has a “normal” gaze like Arbus herself. This gaze “others” her subjects even though she treats them with dignity and produces art that is for “sophisticated urban people” (32) who are normative by society’s standards. The camera’s ability to immortalize a photographer’s gaze simultaneously democratizes high art and reinforces power dynamics through the gazes of photographers who often come from privileged and normative backgrounds.

Surveillance and the Perception of Reality

The colonial-tourist impulse in photography, coupled with its mass proliferation and profiteering, fundamentally alters society’s perception of reality. Most of reality is mediated through images for the everyday person: news, social media, entertainment, etc. Photographic images become the de facto way that society organizes and mediates reality through art, news, and government bureaucracy. Sontag doesn’t consider this a neutral shift in how society organizes and mediates itself. She writes:

The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images (140).

Sontag believes that these images proliferate so much that they become in a sense people’s reality, or “the image-world.” For example, the proliferation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s image in popular culture and his famous “I Have a Dream” speech is often interpreted as a watermark for the progress of racial equality in the US: The image becomes “more real” than the life and work of the revolutionary figure himself. The image-world becomes more real and trustworthy to the public than the reality it portrays.

This new conception of reality is highly useful for surveillance in modern nation-states. Modern nation-states track their populations and police their borders by using photography and images such as passports and identification cards. This “interminable dossier” of the image-world of bureaucratic and artistic photographs provides “possibilities of control that could not even be dreamed of” (122) when writing was the dominant system for information recording. Sontag asserts that the image-world encourages people to self-surveil by desiring to be photographed. The camera orients consumerist society toward valuing vision and photographable surfaces, which provides an endless stream of photographs of people, faces, locations, and activities for surveillance. The invention of image-based social media platforms is a logical consequence of the relationship between surveillance and the image-world that Sontag charts in On Photography.

This relationship between surveillance and the image-world also affects photography as art. Sontag compares the “supertourist” photographer to a voyeuristic anthropologist who colonizes other people’s experiences. The supertourist acts as an agent of surveillance out in the world and sells photographic surveillance as art. Sontag writes that photography “like every mass art form” is “not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite […] and a tool of power” (5). Sontag envisions the photographer not as a politically neutral artist but as a convenient tool of surveillance for the status quo. This conception of the photographer leads back to Sontag’s preoccupation with the socioeconomic conditions that underlie the dissemination of photography and the possibility of becoming a photographer as a job. Photography turns art into a form of surveillance and control to shape public perception of reality in a way that was impossible before the invention of photography.