ON PHOTOGRAPHY

After reading "On Photography" by Susan Sontag, Sontag views photographs as an expression of "a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical," and sees them as "attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality"(pg.16). When an speculator looks at a photo, they get a certain feeling and attitude form the photo. It can make a person fell happy or sad, angry or grateful. Susan is a narrative on the evoultuion of photography. She makes the point that a new visual code exist because "photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe. They are a gram and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the world in our heads-as an anthology of images". Sontag explains how a photo only "show[s] shock insofar as they show something novel"(pg.19). Her point is that the more times a person is exposed to a certain type of image, the less "surprise" there is in seeing that type of image, and the less real the photo becomes.
She asserts that this has changed the viewer in three ways. First, modern photography in concert with advances in technology has created an overabundance of pictures or visual material. photography is also not the whole truth because it is only one moment out of many, and does not establish context. At their best, both forms of media would make their own statements by themselves. Instead, other forces of culture and society have suppressed the power of both. ltimately, Sontag laments that "the best of American photography has given itself over..." In all, I think Sontag makes a detailed and coherent critique of photography through her book.