April 25, 2025
Thanks to Sabahat Ali Wani, a 2025 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
“Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer.” ― Walter De Mulder, Belgian Photographer
A camera’s eye has enveloped and seeped into our being—not only from outside but also from within. We see like a camera’s eye. We understand, confirm, document and store our reality as images. Our gazes have acquired photographic desires, tastes and visions that have seemingly no point of saturation. There is an evident “insatiability of the photographing eye,” as Susan Sontag (1977) calls it, that has changed our “notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe” (p. 3). Today, whenever we see something or someone that we, individually or collectively, consider to be worthy of seeing by us and by others, we tend to capture it as photographs. That is what makes—a scene, an object, a body, a face—of some objective or subjective value for more seeing. It’s a photograph that makes reality, real for us. It’s our evidence, our quick proof of what is real. In fact, it is the ‘reality’ that we place and keep in our pockets, whip out anytime and show everyone: Hey! See this. But with this real-making potential and power of photographs, even something fake can be infused with realness and brought to life. While comparing a fake painting to a fake photograph, Sontag remarks that “a fake painting (one whose attribution is false) falsifies the history of art” but on the other hand, “a fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality” (p. 86). She wrote this decades ago. But upon revisiting it and looking around, towards our worlds of false, fake and generated imagery that have clogged our optic lives, it can be argued that we are not only constantly falsifying reality but also, consuming it, voraciously.
A camera is a device, a tool, an ammunition, a limb of sorts that, over time, I believe, has acquired an anthropomorphic character, possessing human-like characteristics. I do agree that the social location or space of the photographer matters, but the camera also has its own positionality, i.e. rooted in its manufacturing, marketing and instrumentality. Everything and everyone has some use for the camera. Concerning the two takes on a camera’s use, Sontag explains that for the first, “there is nothing that should not be seen,” and for the second, “there is nothing that should not be recorded” (p. 176). Therefore, a camera captures and presents reality in two ways: “aesthetic” and “instrumental.” The former makes us believe that we can create a picture out of anything by repeatedly construing ideas of utility, beauty and interest, and the latter is more information-centric, needed for effective and efficient reactions (p. 176). A camera can commit violence. Once it finds itself in privileged hands, a camera can be dangerous for the photographed. It can quickly and far too easily become a colonial, capitalist and masculine weapon to intrude, invade, attack and dissect the ‘other’. Sontag says that the camera doesn’t kill, but emphasises that “there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture” (p. 14). She writes:
“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 possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of a gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time” (p. 14-15).
So, a camera can violate bodies, but it can capture and document the violence as well. Everything—bombs, burning homes, destroyed towns, bodies under the rubble, starving children, amputated limbs, beatings, torture and killings, mass graves—a camera can record it all. But this recording is not always benign. Even if it’s ethical in its intentions and actions, the consumption or reactions are not always reciprocal, and vice versa. In the moment, a photograph might act like a dart, hitting the desired emotion on the viewer’s sense pad. Still, over time, it can lose its singular aim and activate or deactivate different ways of experiencing. A photograph might have socio-political and even moral-ethical effectivity, but the question is: for how long and wide can that last? Sontag responds that “to suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them” (p. 20). Images can both: “transfix” and “anesthetize” us. They make suffering seem “more real,” but after repeated doses of seeing, they can turn “less real” too (p. 20). Adding onto Sontag’s words, I sense a difference in the optic capacities of a photographer and a viewer. A photographer’s eye, a camera’s eye, doesn’t stop. It possesses an unquenchable character that has the powers of ceaseless production, conversion and transformation. However, the same cannot be said for the viewer’s eye. It can match or even surpass the photographer’s thirst with its demanding appetite. But it exhausts too, not able or wanting to keep up with the compounding images. It does see (willfully or otherwise), but that doesn’t mean that it will act or react every time in the same or expected ways. Gazes—capturing, captured and consuming—are never static and always unstable, making it impossible to box and rest them.
In A Short History of Photography (1931), Walter Benjamin says:
“The illiterate of the future’, it has been said, ‘will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph’. But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?” (p. 215).
To some extent, captions are considered to be an important part of an image, and Sontag remarks that “moralists who love photographs always hope that words will save the picture” (p. 107). She brings in Walter Benjamin’s call about how a “right caption” can “rescue [a picture] from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.” But contends that a photograph can never ‘speak’ like moralists expect it to. Even a captioned photograph can’t ‘speak’ because it is “only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached” (p. 108-109). I agree with Sontag that a photograph cannot speak one truth because of the plurality of meanings it carries and invokes. Photographs can shed skins quickly, move swiftly between past, present and in the liminality of past-present as well, doing both: glamourizing and memorializing mundane experiences, and neutralizing and miniaturizing sufferings. They can be nostalgic and traumatic, serene and chaotic, scary and numbing. They don’t stagnate. Even if they do, it’s a trigger for our eyeballs to pause and record how it has or will change.
Treadmilling on the capitalistic mode of production and consumption, our societies have adopted, celebrated and normalized the image-culture. Sontag puts it aptly: “A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex” (p. 178). But today, the conditions are such that to challenge this image-culture, we need to produce a counter-culture, a photograph to critique the other. If one image attempts to colonize and capitalize, we need another to spring up and decolonise, de-capitalise, and where necessary, de-aesthetize too. It’s a battlefield of visuals, where realities are made real, falsified, then created, re-created, and while doing so, consumed at a thrilling pace.
A textbook for critically engaging with photography, Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) still speaks to our image-societies, making us pause and ponder how we click and capture, see and consume, upload and market, and today, generate and viralize ourselves and others as visuals. It’s a text we must all read, re-read and add to—in a similar spirit to Sontag’s.
First Published: Sontag, S. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York. 1977.
Republished: Sontag, S. On Photography. Penguin Classics. London. 2008.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ red mango
