The Image Reproduced

"Photography is not practised by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power." - Susan Sontag, from On Photography (1977)

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Susan Sontag's quotes from her book "On Photography" are littered throughout this lecture and they are very truthful and thought provoking and despite being written 40 years ago her statements are still very relevant today, so much so that I may purchase this book myself to study and apply to my own photographic journey as she examines the growing importance and popularity of the act of taking photos...

We live in a completely photo-saturated digital age, uncontrollably consuming as well as churning out image after image after image, Instagram being the main culprit for encouraging such intense image sharing and viewing. Our phones are never far from our hands, but now these phones have become high quality and highly portable camera, which allows us to quickly and easily take photos of anything and everything but also instantly share these images with the world. We are all photographers.

Something else Sontag stresses is the effect of photography on our experience of reality. With the development of photography, we could suddenly see something before we experience it. And since the invention of photography, this has only become more and more prevalent, taking away from the moment itself. As Sontag describes it, photography "certifies the experience but also refuses it." What she means by this is that when we place the camera between ourselves and whatever it is that we find remarkable, we are not fully living the experience. Also, we might only travel in search of the photogenic, tuning into what might look good on our Instagrams, but if we only go in search of the photogenic, what do we miss in between?

"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt."  

It is certainly true that photographs promote nostalgia, as Sontag notes in her essay. The very way we share and interact with our images on social media is imbued with an extra sense of nostalgia, such as Facebook "memories" which bring to us a daily photographic memory, or even Instagram filters which fade out the colours of an image to give the look of an old film photograph that has yellowed and aged over time. Photography has given us a way to capture, record, and preserve what will eventually slip away forever.

As my lecturer questions: "Why is it that we have become attracted to these filters? Is it that we have placed a premium value on the old? Do we crave a simpler time? Are these filters harmless, or are we imbuing our images with a kind of instant nostalgia that fakes the emotion of old photographs?"

"To collect photographs is to collect the world… "

- Susan Sontag, from On Photography (1977)

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