PHOTOGRAPHY THEORY #2: Susan Sontag

From a beginner's guide to photography by The Telegraph 

On Photography by Susan Sontag (1977), digested by Rachel Segal Hamilton 

What's it about? 

According to Sontag, photographs turn the world into a set of collectible objects that we can own. This makes us feel knowledgeable, and powerful. But although we still treat photos as evidence, photographers never simply record the world, they interpret it. They might take multiple shots, for example, selecting the ones that meet their preconceptions.
This is true for us non-professsionals, too: we use family albums to connect with the past and take holiday snaps to show our friends what we're up to. Bit by bit, though, photography has started to limit our experience. Instead of photographing what we're doing, we do things so that we can photograph them.
There is a moral dimension to Sontag's critique. By photographing a situation, you can't intervene in it – war photography is horrific, she says, partly because of the way it has become acceptable for a photographer to choose to take a photo rather than to save a life. But images also numb us. The more photographs of suffering we see, the less shocked we are. For Sontag, there is a violence to photography. The camera is predatory because it lets the photographer turn people into objects and to know them in a way they cannot know themselves.
We try to use photography to make sense of reality but the knowledge it gives us will always be sentimental, superficial, never political. To make matters worse, we're hooked. We don't feel we have really experienced something unless we've photographed it. And so we photograph everything. 

In her own words:  

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically posessed.”
“In these last decades 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden our conscience as to arouse it.”
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” 

(SOCIAL MEDIA!!!! Tabloid press?) 

How to sound as if you've read it: 

People these days feel the need to photograph everything - it's totally ruining our experience of life.

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag (2003), digested by Diane Smyth 

This was Sontag's update to On Photography (see above). The intervening years hadn’t softened her stance and Sontag pulls no punches in her critique of images of suffering, “those professional, specialised tourists known as journalists” who make them, and our culpability in looking at them.
She starts by tracing the history of images of suffering, arguing that Christian depictions of martyrdom historically gave way to something more secular that saw pain as something to be deplored. Photographs were quickly pressed into service; justified by the idea they could advocate for change.
Photographs were, and still are, she argues, unequal to the task, because they turn disaster into universal, ineffectual denunciations of human cruelty or suffering. Each image is framed by the person who makes it, and “to frame is to exclude”.
Feeling powerless to change what they see, viewers quickly become immune to images of suffering or - worse - take a prurient interest in them. And because we are bombarded with such images, we no longer recognise them as records of real events.
It’s gloomy reading for committed photojournalists and Sontag has little to offer by way of comfort, other than to suggest that narrative texts, longer portfolios of images, and artworks are more likely to mobilise a viewer (or reader) to action against suffering, or any kind of understanding of it. 

In her own words: 

"Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialised tourists known as journalists. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called ‘news’, features conflict and violence…to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view."
"The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it."
"Making suffering loom larger, by globalising it, may spur people to feel they ought to ‘care’ more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention." 

How to sound as if you've read it:  

Photographs of suffering don't rouse viewers to action because they universalise pain rather than explaining what could be changed. There’s no hope, so stop being a voyeur and take action instead.