“One Reason for the need to photography everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up – and, therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked, they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first, because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and second, because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion.
Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.”
Susan Sontag On Photography.
https://youtu.be/fOCXuuFv9S8?si=4Hkp4q-h-44xDwne
I read and re-read Sontag’s words on photography. I feel a strong connection, a presence with what she says, and a feeling that changes the way I approach photography. Furthermore, I only wish she was alive today, so I could get her thoughts on the digital world we are sinking into.
One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag’s On Photography, first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as “progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” It begins with the famous “In Plato’s Cave”essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic
I’m off-line at the moment.
Be Well Lou
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