Photographs

1. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

2. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings.

3. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world themselves, get reduced blown up cropped retouched doctored tricked out.

4. Photographs which package the world seem to invite package.

5. Photographs furnish evidence.

6. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.

7. A photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency.

8. Photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as they as paintings and drawings are.

9. Images which idealize are no less aggressive then the work which makes a virtue of plainness.

10. Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.

11. It is mainly a social rite a defense against anxiety and a tool of power.

12. Through photographs each family constructs a portrait chronicle of itself a possible kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.

13. A way of certifying experience taking photographs is also a way of refusing it.

14. Picture taking is an event in it itself and one with ever more peremptory rights.

15. While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people the photographer stays behind his or her camera creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all.

16. Although the camera is an observation station the act of photographing is more than passive observing.

17. All activities that unlike the sexual push and shove can be conducted from a distance and with some detachment.

18. Like a car a camera is sold as a predatory weapon one that’s as automated as possible ready to spring.

19. Like guns and cars cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.



Digital cameras and camera phones have had a negative impact on photography because they are always readily available and the pictures taken are insignificant and take away from the importance of film. We think Sontag would concur with this and she would have a feeling of disapproval of these technological advances of photography.