Response to Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’

Response to Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’

A main point of this article is that “photographs alter and enlarge out notions of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe”.  I think that this is true.  As stated in the other articles that we have been instructed to read during this assignment, photography allows people to photograph anything and everything, and they do.  They photograph really pointless things, and then they seem important.  While those photographs make the objects themselves seem important, it also takes away from the importance of the photograph.  People take photographs, print them, store them, carry them around, etc, and take for granted that they are readily available.  They also use them to alter reality without really thinking about is.  People enlarge them, crop them, rotate, alter, edit, and lots of other things.  This also takes the value away from a photograph.  A long time ago, photographs use to be a big deal and really special.  Now they are used everywhere, from police to doctors to students, and they are readily available, and really have to value.  I agreed with all of this as it was stated in the article.  And while the article was pointing out all the ways they were used (and abused) I hadn’t really realized how dependent our current world is on photographs.  For example, in most things that people do, most people prefer photographs over drawings and descriptions.  Such as class power points in high school.  No one would use a drawing of grapes on a slide if they were talking about grapes, and of course they would not stand there and describe the way grapes look; they would want a photograph.  Photographs are used and devalued by everyone.  

They are also widely used to represent things that exist, once existed, or one happened.  They are used to represent the great monuments of the world, and the family vacation people took last year.  They make up our image of the modern world.  I think that without photographs, people would be really lost, but it would make them more imaginative, and less lazy.  Instead of just snapping a picture during a family vacation, they would take time to look around and really take in the moment and environment.  Maybe even take time to remember it more accurately because they would not have a photograph to rely on.