Collecting the World: Susan Sontag on Photography, Voyeurism, and Aesthetic Consumerism

We present excerpts from Susan Sontag’s book “On Photography,” where the philosopher reflects on why collecting photographs is an attempt to collect the world, how and when photography introduced-and then imposed-a new ethics of seeing, expanding and changing our ideas about what and how we should look at, why the camera is the perfect tool for an acquisitive mind, what new relationship to the world the act of photographing creates, how photo-dependence develops, and why modern societies “hook” their citizens on images.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. By freezing a moment, every photograph testifies to the relentless melting away of time.

Since 1973, essays by the most influential and provocative thinker of the 20th century, Susan Sontag, began appearing in the “most intellectual literary magazine,” The New York Review of Books. All were devoted to photography, but behind this topic lay much more serious questions-about modern man, his self-perception, consciousness, relationships with culture, and with himself. Reflecting on the widespread proliferation of photography, Sontag concludes that this leads to a special relationship between people and the world-a chronic voyeurism-where everything is placed on the same level, acquiring the same meaning and losing its value. That was in the 1970s-what would she say now?

Sontag was ahead of her time, so it’s no surprise that her collection of essays “On Photography” (published in 1977) became a must-read not only for those interested in the history and theory of photography, but also for people interested in contemporary culture and the psychology of 20th-century society. Here are some of Susan Sontag’s thoughts on photography, people, and their relationship with the world.

Photography and the Ethics of Seeing

Humanity still dwells in Plato’s cave, content with shadows and images of truth. But photography teaches us differently than older, more handmade images. First, there are now far more images vying for our attention. The inventory began in 1839, and since then, it seems almost everything has been photographed. This insatiability of the photographic eye changes the conditions of our cave-our world. By teaching us a new visual code, photographs change and expand our ideas about what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe. They are the grammar and, more importantly, the ethics of seeing. And, finally, the most grandiose result of photographic activity: it gives us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images.

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Films (whether cinema or television) cast light on walls, flicker, and fade. But a still photograph is a thing, easy and cheap to make; it’s easy to carry, accumulate, store. In Godard’s “The Carabineers” (1963), two lazy peasant-lumpens are lured into the army with promises that they can loot, rape, kill, do whatever they want to their enemies-and get rich. But the suitcase of trophies they bring home to their wives contains only hundreds of postcards of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Means of Transport, Works of Art, and other treasures of the Earth. Godard’s joke sharply parodies the ambiguous magic of photographic images. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that create and thicken the environment we call modern. Photography is a captured experience, and the camera is the ideal instrument for an acquisitive consciousness.

The Photographic Worldview

The advent of photography greatly expanded the boundaries of our perception of reality-primarily due to the inherent, or apparent, omnivorousness of the photographic eye-the lens. Soon after its birth, photography offered, and then imposed, its own new ethics of seeing, expanding and changing our ideas about what can and should be looked at. It succeeded especially because it gave each of us the opportunity to create in our minds a complete “anthology of images of the world” or, more simply, to collect photographs. The photographic worldview does not recognize sequence or connection between phenomena and at the same time gives each moment or phenomenon a certain mystery and significance. The greatest wisdom contained in a photographic image tells us: “This is the surface; now think, feel, intuit what lies beneath. Calculate what reality must be, given this surface appearance.”

Thus, without explaining anything themselves, photographs serve as an inexhaustible source for reflection and fantasy. To the extent that understanding a phenomenon is rooted in the ability not to take appearance for reality, photography, strictly speaking, does not contribute to our understanding of reality. While photography certainly fills many gaps in our mental vision, in our ideas of what something looked like, we must also realize that every photograph hides more than it shows. Brecht said that a photograph of the Krupp factory tells us nothing, in essence, about that organization. Our knowledge based on photographic images can influence our consciousness, our conscience; but photographic knowledge is doomed always to be sentimental-humanistic or cynical. Knowledge based on photography is a semblance of knowledge, of wisdom, just as the process of photographing is a semblance of acquisition, a pseudo-possession of the thing, event, or person captured. The act of photographing is akin to acquiring objects; moreover, it creates a new relationship to the world as an object, a relationship that gives the photographer a feeling akin to knowledge.

Unlike verbal descriptions, paintings, and drawings, a photographic image is perceived not so much as an expression of an opinion about reality, but as a piece of reality itself, a fragment of the world that anyone can make or, at the very least, simply acquire.

Photographs provide irrefutable evidence that the events or people they depict existed, happened, or continue to exist and happen. We perceive any photograph as the most accurate depiction of the facts of visible reality compared to any other image. Yet the relationship between photography and reality is analogous to the relationship between art and truth in general. Even when photographers strive for the most accurate reproduction of life, they are inevitably guided-consciously or unconsciously-by considerations of taste and the imperatives of their conscience. Even the choice of a particular exposure subjects the object to the standards of a particular way of seeing.

Claims that photographs are interpretations of reality to the same extent as paintings are not refuted by examples of almost indiscriminate, passive shooting. But it is precisely this passivity, combined with ubiquity, that constitutes the most characteristic feature of photography’s mission-its “aggressiveness.” From its very inception, photography contributed to the widespread dissemination of a new kind of consciousness, a way of thinking-a relationship to the world as a collection of potential photographs. Even in the hands of early artists like David Octavius Hill and Julia Cameron, the camera declared the truly imperial ambitions of photography-to capture, to record everything possible.

Photography as Ritual and Social Practice

Recently, photography has become almost as popular a pastime as sex or dancing-which means that, like any mass art form, most people engage in it not for artistic purposes. It is mainly a social ritual, a defense against anxiety, and a tool for self-assertion.

Through photographs, the family creates its portrait history-a set of images attesting to its unity. It doesn’t matter much what the family was doing in the photos-what matters is that they were photographed and that the pictures are cherished. Photography becomes a ritual of family life precisely when, in industrialized countries of Europe and America, the institution of the family is undergoing radical surgery. As the closed family unit was cut out of the larger kinship community, photography appeared to immortalize the memory of disappearing ties, to symbolically confirm the threatened continuity. These ghostly traces-photographs-symbolically compensate for the absence of scattered relatives. The family photo album is usually dedicated to the extended family, and often it’s the only thing left of it.

Just as photographs create the illusion of possessing a past that no longer exists, they help people possess spaces where they do not feel confident. Thus, photography develops in tandem with another of the most typical modern activities-tourism. For the first time in history, people in large numbers leave their familiar places for short periods. And it seems unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera. Photographs will be irrefutable proof that the trip happened, that the program was completed, that we had fun. Photographs document the process of consumption that took place outside the view of family, friends, neighbors. Dependence on the camera as a device that gives reality to experience does not diminish even as people travel more. Taking pictures equally satisfies the needs of the cosmopolitan, collecting photo-trophies from a trip down the White Nile or a two-week tour of China, and the modest vacationer, capturing the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls.

Photographing certifies experience and at the same time narrows it-limiting it to the search for the photogenic, turning experience into an image, into a souvenir. Travel becomes a way of accumulating photographs.

The very act is calming, easing the sense of disorientation that often intensifies while traveling. Most tourists feel the need to place a camera between themselves and what they find remarkable. Unsure of their reaction, they take a picture. This gives the experience form: stop, shoot, move on. This system is especially attractive to people who have submitted themselves to a relentless work ethic-Germans, Japanese, Americans. Manipulating the camera soothes the anxiety that a work-obsessed person feels on vacation from not working and having to have fun. And so, they do something pleasantly reminiscent of work-take pictures.

Photography, Voyeurism, and the Illusion of Participation

Photography has become one of the main mediators in perceiving reality, creating the illusion of participation. In an ad taking up a full page, a group of people is shown looking at the reader, all but one appearing stunned, excited, upset. Only one is composed, almost smiling-the one holding a camera to his eye. The others are passive, clearly anxious spectators; the one with the camera is made active by it; he alone is in control. What did these people see? We don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. This is the Event, something worthy of being seen-and therefore photographed. The ad’s text at the bottom, in white letters on a dark background, consists of just six words, as abrupt as news on a teletype: “.Prague. Woodstock. Vietnam. Sapporo. Londonderry. ‘LEICA.'” Lost hopes, youthful frenzies, colonial wars, winter sports-all are the same, all are leveled by the camera.

Photography has established a chronic voyeuristic relationship to the world, equalizing the significance of all events.

The act of photographing actually excludes the possibility for the photographer to participate in an event in their primary human capacity. Consider examples of photojournalism, like the shot of the Vietnamese monk reaching for a can of gasoline, or the partisan in Bengal stabbing his bound victim with a bayonet. And yet, through the act of shooting, the photographer still participates to some extent: after all, taking a picture presupposes an interest in what is happening. The photographer is interested in the event, even if that interest is limited to wanting the event to last long enough to get a “good shot”; he is interested in everything that gives the event “photogenicity,” including the pain or misfortune experienced by his subject.

As with sexual voyeurism, the observer indirectly, or even directly, encourages the situation to unfold as it does.

Photography as Exploitation and Memento Mori

Photographing people implies exploiting their appearance. The photographer sees and captures their subject in a way the subject can never see themselves. He can learn things about them that the subject cannot know. The shot turns a person into a kind of object, allowing for symbolic possession.

Photography is an elegiac, twilight art. Almost all objects of photography are marked by a certain tragedy, if only because they have become its objects. Every photograph is a “reminder of death”-a memento mori. By photographing a person, the photographer becomes a witness to their defenselessness before relentless time.

That photography can arouse various desires in viewers is obvious and well known. But photography can also evoke a whole range of moral attitudes. However, while the mechanism for arousing desires through photography is simple and direct, the effect of photographs on moral attitudes is much more complex. In the first case, a photograph need only be an abstract archetype, while in the second, its impact is greater the more concrete and historical the image it presents. A photo report on tragic events can provoke a public response only when society is ready to respond to the stimulus provided by these photographs. The horrors of the American Civil War, captured by Matthew Brady and his colleagues-especially the images of emaciated Southern prisoners-only fueled anti-Southern sentiment in the North. The conclusion: photography cannot create a moral position, but it can greatly reinforce an already formed or emerging one.

Photography, Information, and Aesthetic Consumerism

Photography has changed the concept of information. It is a slice, a “piece” of both space and time. Thanks to photography, the boundaries of phenomena have become blurred, arbitrary-now any sequence of photo images can be presented in any order. The gap between events, as well as their proximity, can be predetermined and arbitrary. Photography asserts a nominalist worldview, a nominalist idea of social reality as a phenomenon consisting of an infinite number of tiny links, like the endless number of photographs that record it.

The desire to confirm reality and expand experience through photography is aesthetic consumerism, which everyone today is infected with.

Industrial societies hook their citizens on images. This is the most insurmountable form of mental pollution. An acute need for beauty, an unwillingness to explore what lies beneath the surface, intoxication with the physical world-all these components of erotic feeling are manifested in the pleasure we get from photography. But this pleasure has a flip side, alien to freedom. It is no exaggeration to say that people develop photo-dependence: the need to turn experience into a way of seeing. Ultimately, the impression becomes identical to photographing, and participation in a public event becomes equivalent to viewing it as an image. Mallarm�, the most logical aesthete of the 19th century, said that everything in the world exists to end up in a book. Today, everything exists to end up in a photograph.