My Intellectual Crush on Susan Sontag Knows No Bounds

In my art history class on photography in my freshman year, I read Susan Sontag's groundbreaking essays On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others. Ever since reading those two essays, my perception of the medium of photography as an art form has been radically changed. Revisiting Sontag's final chapter of On Photography entitled "The Image World" reminded me of the power of her words and her perception of photography as a medium.

In "The Image World," Sontag alludes to Plato's essay "The Cave" as a starting point for her discussion on the power of the image as a representation of reality and a substitution for the real world. She claims that photographs contain an essence of reality, instead of merely reproducing it. I especially loved when she touched on the photographic process as having a kind of magic. It reminded me of Dorsky's argument for film having a "devotional" aspect.

When Sontag touches on how photographs have the power to "surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing," it reminded me of Barthes argument through his essay Camera Lucida, in which he meditates on his mother's death through the search of a picture that accurately represents her "essence": essentially an accurate representation of who she was as a person to him.

Sontag ends her essay with a meditation on the need for photography in a consumer-based and capitalist society; she argues that the images themselves become a consumable object. Thus, she concludes by stating that fewer images, and not more, would make photography more "precious" to individuals.     

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