Susan Sontag

ON PHOTOGRAPHY
 ).-_'.-*'

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In Plato's Cave
It Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still
reveling, its ageold habit, in mere images of the truth. But
being educated by photographs is not like being educated by ll
older, more artisanal images. For onE thing, there are a great
many more images around, clairning our attention" The
inventory started in 1839 and since then iust about every-
thing has been photographed, or so it seems. This very
insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of
confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new
visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of
what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.
They are a grammar and, even more irnportantly, an ethics
of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photo
graphic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold
the whole world in our heads-as an antholory of images.
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and
television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but
with still photographs the image is also en obiect, light-
weighf cheap to produce, @sI to carry about, accumulate,
$tore. In Godard's Les Cdrabiniers (1963), two sluggish
lumpen-peasanb are lured into ioining the King's Army by
the promise that they will be able to loot, mp€, kill, or do
whatever else they please to the enerny, and get rich" But
the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulpse trium-
phantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to
contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monu-
ments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Naturb,
Methods of Transport, Worlc of Art, and other classified
treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly paro
dies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photo
graphs are prhaps the most mysterious of all the obiects
that malce up, and thicken, the environment we recognize
as modern. Photographs realb ere experienct capfured, and
 the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the

mood. image of an image. But since it is, to begin with; a printed,

1l To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. srnooth obiect, a photograph loses much less of its essential t5

It rneans putting oneself into a certain relation to the world quality when reproduced in e boolc than e painting does.
Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting
lhat feels like knowledge-snd, therefore, Iilce power. A now
F---- notorious 6rst fall into alienation, habituating people to gtoups of photographs into general circulation. T'he se-
quence in which the photographs are to be looked at is
abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have
engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers

damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time
print seems e less treacherous form of leaching out the to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, .St
world, of turning it into a mental obiect, than photographic i'a,ais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated
images, which now provide most of the knowledge people meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests
have about the look of the past and the reach of the present" a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarg-
What is written about e person or an event is frankly an ing) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for
.
as are handmade visual statemen'ts, like looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain
. interpretation,
paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem in visual legibility and emotional impact, But photographs
to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, transcribed in a 6lm c€ase to be collectable obiects, as they

miniatures of reality that anyone can malce or acquire. still are when served up in books.

Photographs, wtich 6ddle with the scale of the world,

themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doc-
tored, tricked out. They a$e, plagued by the usual ills of ft Photographs furnish evidenc€. Something we hear about,

paper obiects; they disappear; they becorne valuable, and get

but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photogFph
bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incrimi-
package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck
nates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the
murderous roundup of Cornmunards in fune 1871, photo
in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, Pre
graphs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveil-
iected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them;
lance and control of their increasingly mobile populations.
cops alphabetizn them; museums exhibit them; publishers
compile thern"
In another version of its utility, the camera recprd iustifies.
For rnany decades the book has been the most influential
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given
thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always
way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photograPhs,
thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality-
e presumption that somethit g exists, or did exist, which
photographs are fragile obiects, easily torn or mislaid-'end
is like what's in the picture. Whatwer the limitations
 (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of as much en interpretation of the world as paintings and
the individual photographer, e photograph-any photo drawings are" Those occasions when the taking of photo-
ol graph-seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more graphs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self- [z
accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic eftacing do not lesen the didacticism of the whole enter-
objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and prise. This very passivity -and ubiquity--of the photograph-
Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs ic record is photography's "message," its aggression.
decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal pho-
"out there," iust like the Polaroid owner for whom photo tography) are no less aggressive than work which malces e
graphs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutter- virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker
bug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenin of daily sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every
life. useof thecamera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s,
While a painting or a prose description can never be other photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the suc-
than e narrowly selective interpretation, I photograph can ceeding decades, during which technol ogy made possible an
be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the
the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs au- world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early
thority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers masters as David Octavius Hill and fulia Margaret Cameron
do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce who used the cameri.as a means of getting painterly imags,
between art and truth. Even when photographers are most the point of taking photographs was a vast departure frorn
concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the
tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely capture of the largest possible number of subiects. Painting
gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photo neyer had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrializa-
graphic proiect of the late 1930s (among them Walker tion of camera technology only carried out a promise inher-
Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Rusell Lee) would ent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize
take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper aU experienc€s by translating them into images.
subiects until satisfied that they had gotten iust the right That age when taking photographs required e cumber-
look on 6lm-the precise expression on the subiect's face some and expensive contraption-the toy of the clever, the
that supported their own notions about povertr, light, dig- wealthy, and the obsesssd-sgsrns remote indeed from the
nity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In. deciding how era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pic-
a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, tures. The 6rst cameras, made in France and England in the
photographers ere always imposing standards on their sub- early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them"
iects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does Since there were then no professional photographers, there
indeed capture reality; not iust interpret it, photographs are could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had
 no clear social use; it was e gratuitous, that is, an artistic cal surgery. As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family,
activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate,
sl only with its industfialization that photogaphy came into photography came along to mem orialize, to restate symboli-
ls
its own es art. As industrializetion provided social uses for cally, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness
the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against of farnily life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the
' these uses reinfbt.td*the setlf-consciousness of photography- . token Presence of the dispersed relatives. A family's photo-
as-art. graph album is generally about the extended family-and,
often, is all that remains of it.
As photograPhs give people an imagin ary possession of.a
ft Recently, photography has become almost as widely prac- past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession
ticed an amusernent as sex and dancing-which means that, of sPac'e in which they are insecure. Thus, photography
like every mass art forrn, photography is not practiced by develops in tandern with one of the most characteristic of
most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense modern activities: tourism. For the 6rst time in hist oW,large
against anxi€tl, and a tool of power. numbers of people regularly travel out of their habitual
Mernorializing the achievements of individuals consid- environments for short periods of time. It seerns positively
ered as members of families (as well as of other groups) is unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera
the earliest popular use of photography. For at least a cen- along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the
tury, the wedding photograph has been as much e part of trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun
the ceremony as the prescribed verbal formulas. Cameras go was had- Photographs document sequences of consumption
with family life. According to a sociological study done in carried on outside the view of family, friends, neighbors. But
France, most houspholds have e camera, but a household dependence on the camera, rs the device that makes real
with children is twice as likelli to have at least one camera what one is experiencing, doesn't fade when people travel
as a household in which there are no children. Not to take rnore. Taking photographs fills the same need for the cos-
pictures of one's childr€D, particularly when they are small, mopolitans accumulating photograph-trophies of their boat
is a sign of parental indifference, iust as not turning up for trip uP the Albert Nile or their fourteen days in China as
one's graduation picture is a gesture of adolescent rebellioR. it does for lower-middle-class vacationers taking snapshots of
Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait- the Eiffel Tower or Nia gare Falls.
chronicle of itself-a portable kit of images that bears wit- A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also
ness to its connectedness. It hardly matters what activities' e way of refusing it-by limiting experience to a search for
ere photographed so long as photographs get taken and are the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a
cherished. Photography becomes e rite of family life iust souvenir. Travel becomes a strat egy for accumulating photo
when, in the industrializing countries of Europe and Amer- graphs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothiDg, and
ica, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radi- assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to
 be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put don't knorv. And it doesn't matter. It is an Event: something
the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable worth seeing-and therefore worth photographing. The ad
l0l that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a @p/, white letters ecross the dark lower third of the photo It t

picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take J photo graph like new$ coming over a telet/ire'maehine, consists of
graph, and move on. The rnethod especially appeals to pec iust six words: ".. . Prague . . . Woodstock . . . Vietnam
ple handicapped by a ruthless work glhis-{Germans, fapa- Sapporo . " " Londonderry ." . LEICA." Crushed hopes,
nese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety vouth antics, colonial wars, and winter sports are 3lilqs'-sss
which the workdriven feel about not working when they are equali zed by the camera. Taling photographs has set up a
on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have chronrc voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the
something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they moaning of all events.
can take pictures. '\ photograph is not iust the result of an encounter be-
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fer- rween an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an
vent picture takers, at home and abroad. Everyone who lives event rn itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights-
in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going
past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and on" Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the
fapan, the break with the past has been particularly trau- camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras per-
matic. In the early 1970s, the fable of the brash Ameri- suasively suggests that time consists of interesting events,
can tourist of the 1950s and 1960s, rich with dollars and events worth photographing. This, in turn, malces it easy to
Babbittry, was replaced by the mystery of the group-minded feel that any event, once undenpay, and whatever its moral
fapanese tourist, newly released from his island prison by the character, should be allowed to complete ;bslf---so that
miracle of overvalued /€D, who is generally armed with two something else can be brought into the world, the photo-
cameras, one on each hip. graph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist,
Photography has become one of the principal devices for conferring on the event a kind of imrnortality (and impor-
experiencing something, for giving an appearance of partici- tance) it would never othenvise have enioyed. While real
pation. One full-page ad shows e small group of people people are out there killing themselves or other real people,
standing pressed together, peering out of the photograph, all the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating
but one looking stunned, excited, upset. The one who wears a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids
e different expression holds a c?mera to his eye; he seerns to outlast us all.
self-possesed, is almost smiling. \lftile the others are pas- Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention.
siven clearly alarmed spectators, having a qlmera has trans- Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contempo-
formed one person into something active, a voyeur: only he rery photoiournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze
has mastered the situation. What do these people see? We reachiqrg for thC gasoline can, of a Bengali guenilla in the
 .ect of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the Arbus wrote, "and when I first did ft I felt very perverse."
awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations Being a professional photographer can' be thought of es
lzl where the photographer has the choice between a photo naughg, to use Arbus's pop word, if the photographer seeks lr
graph and a life, to choose the photograph. The Person who out subiects considered to be disreputable, taboo, marginal,
intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording can- But naughty subiects are harder to find these days. And what
not intervene. -DzigaVertov's great 6lm, Man with a Movie exactly is the perverse aspect of picture-taking? If profes-
Camera (1929), gives the ideal image of the photographer sional photographers often have sexual fantasies when they
aS someone in perpetual movement, someone moving are behind the camera, perhaps the perversion lies in the
through a panorama of disparate events with such agility and fact that these fantasies are both plausible and so inappropri-
speed that any intervention is out of the question. Hitch- ate. ln Blowup (1966), Antonioni has the fashion photogra-
cock's Rear Window (19 51) gives the complemen tary pher hovering convulsively over Verushke's body with his
image: the photographer played by fames Stewart has an camera clicking. Naughtiness, indeed! In fact, using a cam-
intensified relation to one event, through his camera, pre- era is not a very good way of getting at someone sexually"
cisely because he has e broken leg and is confined to e Between photographer and subiect, there has to be distance.
wheelchair; being temporarily immobilized prevents him The camera doesn't Hp€, or even possess, though it may
from acting on what he sees, and makes it even rnore impor- "
presume, inhude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the far-
tant to take pictures. Even if incompatible with intervention thest reach of metaphor, assassinate-all activities that, un-
in a physical sense, using a camera is still a form of participa' like the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a
tion. Although the camera is an observation station, the act distance, and with some detachment.
of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual There is a much stronger sexual fantasy in Michael Pow-
voyeurism, it is e way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, ell's extraordinary movie Peeping Tom (1960), which is not
encou ragingwhatever is going on to keep on happening. To about a Peeping Tom but about e psychopath who kills
take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in women with a w€itpon concerled in his camera, while phote
the status qbo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as graphing them. Not once does he touch his subiects. He
it takes to get a "good picture), to be in complicity with doesn't desire their bodies; he wants their presence in the
whatever makes a subiect interesting, worth photographing fonn of filmed images-those showing them experiencing
when that is the interest, another Person's pain their own death-which he screens at home for his solitary
-including, pleasure. The movie assumes @nnections betrveen impo
or misfortune.
tence and aggression, profesionalized looking and cruelty,
which point to the central fanta$y connected with the cam-
It "l of photography es a naughty thing to
always thought era. The camera as phallus is, at rnost, a fimsy variant of the

ds,-1hat was one of. my favorite things about it," Diane inescapable metaphor that everyone unselfconsciously em-
 ploys. However hazy our awareness of this fantasy, it is murde r-e soft rnurder, appropriate to a sad, frightened
named without subtlety whenever we talk about "loading" time.
lll and 'laiming" e camera, about "shooting" a film. Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their lts
The old-fashioned camera was clumsier and harder to aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the
reload than a brown Bess musket. The modern camera is price being an even more image-choked world. One situa-
trying to be a ray gun. One ad reads: tion where people are switching from bullets to 6lm is the
photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari in East
The Yashica ElectrvTS CT is the spaceage camera your family Africa. The hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winches-
will love. Take beautiful pictures day or night. Automatically. ters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to airn e
Without any nonsense. Iust aim, focus and shoot. The GT's rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture. In
computer brain and electronic shutter will do the rest. endof-the-century london, Samuel Butler cornplained that
"there is a photographer in every bush, going about like a
Like a car, a camera is sold as e predatory weapon--{ne roaring lion seeking whom he may devour." The photogra-
that's as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste pher is now charging real beasts, beieaguered and too rare
expects an eaq/, 8n invisible technology, Manufacturers rees- to kill. Cuns have metamorphosed into cameras in this ear-
sure their customers that taking pictures demands no skill nest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased
or expert lcnowledge, that the machine is all-knowing, and to be what it always had fgsn-ryhat people needed protec-
responds to the slightest pressure of the will. Itls as simple tion from. Now ssfsls-fsmed, endangered, mortal
as turning the ignition key or pulling the trigger. needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, w€
Lilce guns and Glrs, cameras are fantasy-machines whose shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.
use is addictive. However, dCIpite the extravagances of or- It is a nostalgrc time right now, and photographs actively
dinary language and advertising, they are not lethal. In the promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight
hyperbole that marlcets cars like gun$, there is at least this art. Most subiects photographed are, iust by virtue of being
much huth: except in wartime, crrs kill more people than photographed; touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque
guns do. The camera /gn does not kill, so the ominous subiect may be moving because it has been dignified by the
rnetaphor seems to be all blufi-like a man's fantasy of attention of the photographer. A beautiful subiect can be
having I gun, knife, or tool between his legs. Still, there is the obiect of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed
something predatory in the act of taking e picture. To or no longer exists. An photographs are memento mori. To
photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as take a photograph is to participate in another person's (ot
they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them thing's) m_grtality, vulnerability, mutability" Precisely by slic-
they can never have; it turns people into obiects that ciln ing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify
be symbolically possessed. Iust as the camera is a sublima- to fime's relentless melt.
tion of the guo, to photograph sorn@ne is e sublimated Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment
 when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous
'
ts exPerr'enced in each instance as all foreground, im-
rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biologi- rnediacy. tt is aroused by archetypes and rs, in that sense,
16l cal and social life are being.destroyed in a brief span of time, abstract. But moral feelings are embedded in history, whose ltz
e device is available to record what is disappearing. The Personae are concrete, whose situations are always specific.
moody, intricately textured Paris of Atget and Brassai. is Thus, almost opposite rules hold true for the use of the
mostly gone. Like the'deaf relatives and friends preserved photograph to awaken desire and to awaken conscience. The _
in the family album, whose pr$ence in p}otographs exor- irnages that mobilize conscience are always linked to a given
cises some of the anxiety and remorse prompted by their historical situation. The more general they are, the less likely
disappearance, so the photographs of neighborhoods now they are ts be effective.
torn down, rural places disfigured and made banen, supply A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone
our pocket relation to the past. of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there
A photograph is both e pseudcpresence and a token of is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude. The photo

absence. Lilce e wood fire in e room, photographs<spe- graPhs Mathew Brady and his colleagues took of the horrors
cially those of people, of distant landscepes and faraway of the battlefields did not make people any less keen to go
cities, of the vanished past are incitements to revede. The on with the Civil War. The photographs of ill-clad, skeletal
sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs prisoners held at Andersonville inflamed Northern public
feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom opinion-aflzinst the South. (The effect of the Anderson-
desirability is enhanced by distance. The lover's photograph ville photographs must have been partly due to the very
hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph novelty, tt that time, of seeing photographs.) The political
of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the cam- understanding that many Americans came to in the 1960s
paign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's would allow them, Iooking at the photographs Dorothea
coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the I-ange took of Nisei on the West Coast being transported
yissl-sll such talisrnanic uses of photographs expre$ a feel- to internment camps in l9+2, to recognize their subject for
ing both sentimental and implicitly magical: they ar€ at- what it wss-a crime committed by the government against
tempts to contact or lay claim to another- reality. e large group of American citizens. Few people who saw
those photographs in the 1940s could have had $o unequivo
cal a reaction; the grounds for such a iudgment were covered
Photographs can abet desire in the rnost dirrct, utilitarian
It over by the prewar consensus" Photographs cannot create
wey-es when someone collects photographs of anonymous a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help
exampla of the desirable as an aid to masturbation. The build a nascent one.
matter is more complex when photographs are used to stim- Photographs may be more memorable than moving im-
ulate the moral impulse. Desire has no lristory-at least, it rgs, because they are a neat slice of time, not e ffow.
 Television is e stream of underselected images, each of worth photographitrg, it is still ideology (in the broadest
which cencels its predecessor. Each still photograph is e sense) that determines what constitutes an event. There can
l8l privileged moment, turned into a slim obiect that one can be no evidence, photographic or othenvise, of an event until ltq
keep and loolc at again. Photographs like the one that made the event itself hm been named and characterized. And it
the front page of most newspapers in the world in 1972- is never photographic evidence which crln construgf-more
e naked South Vietnamese child iust sprayed by American properly, identify--{vents; the contribution of photography
napalrn, running down e highway toward the slmera, her always follows the namin g of the event. What determines
arms open, screaming with pain-probably did more to in- the possibility of being afiected morally by photographs is
crqlse the public revulsion against the war than a hundred the existence of a relevant political consciousness. Without
hours of televised barbarities. a politics, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will
One would like to imagine that the Americ€n public most likely be experienced as, simply, unreal or as a dernoral-
would not have been so unanimous in its acquiesccnce to the izing emotional blow.
Korean War if it had been confronted with photographic The quality of feeling, including rnoral outrage, that Peo-
evidence of the devastation of Korea, an ecocide and gene ple can muster in response to photographs of the oppressed,
cide in some respects even more thorough than those in- the exploited, the starving, and the massacred also depends
flicted on Vietnam a decade later. But the supposition is on the degree of their familiarity with these images. Don
trivial. The public did not see such photographs because McCullin's photographs of emaciated Biafrans in the early
there was, ideologically, no space for them. No one brought 1970s had less impact for some people than Werner Bi-
back photographs of daily life in foongyang, to show that' schof's photographs of Indian famine victirns in the early
the enemy had e human face, as Felix Greene and Marc 1950s because those images had become banal, arrd the
Riboud brought back photographs of Hanoi. Americens did photographs of Tu ercg families dying of starvation in the
have access to photographs of the sufiering of the Viet- subsahara that appeared in magazines everywhere in 197)
namese (many of which came from military sources and must have seemed to many lilce an unberable replay of a
were taken with quite e difterent r$e in mind) because norv familiar atrocity exhibition.
iournalists felt baclced in their eftorts to obtain those photo Photographs shocl insofar as they show something novel.
graphs, the event having been defined by a significant num- Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised-partly
ber of people as a savage colonialist war. The Korean War through the very proliferation of such images of horror.
was understood differently-sr par-t of the iust struggle of One's first enc\ounter with the photographic inventory of
the Free World against the Soviet Union.and China-end, ultimate honor is e kind of revelation, the prototlpically
given that characterization, photographs of the cruelty of modern revelation: e negative epiphany. For ffi€, it was
unlimited Ameriqln firepower would have been irreleVant. photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I qlme
Though an event has come to mean, precisely, something across by chance in e bookstore in Santa Monica in luly
 191r. Nothing I have sssp-is photographs or in real life catalogue of misery and iniustfce throughout the world has
ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making
201 it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, the horrible seem more ordinary-making it appear familiar, lzt
before I saw those photographs (l was twelve) and after, remote ("it's only a photograph"), inevitable. At the tirne
though it was several yean before I understood fully what of the first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was noth-
they were about. What good was served by seeing thern? ing bahal about.these images. After thirty years, a saturation
They were only photographs---of an event I had scarcely point may have been reached. In these last decades, "con-
heard of and could do nothing to afiect, of suffering I could cerned" photography has done at least as much to deaden
hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I conscience as to arouse it.
looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit The ethical content of photographs is fragile. With the
had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevo possible exception of photographs of those horrors, Iike the
cably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to Nazi camps, that have gained the status of ethical reference
tighten; something went dead; something is still crying. points, most photographs do not keep their emotional
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the charge. A photograph of 1900 that was affecting then be-
photographed irnages of suffering, which does not necessar- cause of its subiect would, today, be more likely to move us
ily strengthen cpnscience and the ability to be compassion- because it is e photograph taken in 1900. The particular
ate. It c:rn also cornrpt them. Once one has seen such qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed
images, one has started down the road of seeing rnole-and up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance
more. Images trans6x. Images anesthetize. An event known seems built into the very experience of looking at photo-
through photographs certainly becomes more real than it graphs, if not right ewey, then certainly with the passage of
would have been if one had never seen the photographs-- time. Time eventually positions most photogaphs, even the
thinlc of the Vietnam War. (For e counter-exarnple, think most amateurish, at the level of art.
of the Gulag Archipelago, of which we have no photo-
graphs.) But after repeated exposure to images it also
becomes less real. ft The industrialization of photography permitted its rapid
The same law holds for evil as for pornography. The shock absorption into rational--that is, bureaus6fig-srays of run-
of photqgrapled atrocities w€nrs off with repeated viewings, ning society. No longer toy images, photographs became
irst as the surprise and tiemusement felt the first time one part of the general furniture of the environmenf-fsqch-
sees a pornog[aphic movie welr oft after one sees a few .stones and confirmations of that reductive approach to real-
more. 'llhe sense of taboo which malces us indignant and ity which is considered realistic. Photographs were enrolled
sorrowful is not much sturdier than the sense of taboo that in the service of important institutions of control, notably
regulates the de6nition of what is obscene. And both have the farnily and the police, 8s symbolic obiects and as pieces
been sorely tried in recent years. The vast photographic of information. Thus, in the bureaucratic cataloguing of the
 world, many important documents are not valid unless they graphs, the world becomes e series of unrelated, freestanding
have, affixed to them, a photograph-token of the citizen's particles; and history, past and present, e set of anecdotes
zzl face. and faits divers, The camera makes reality atomic, man age- 0t
The "realistic" view of the world compatible with bu- able, and opaque. It is e view of the world which denies
reaucrecy redefines knowledge-as technigues and informa- interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each
tion. Photographs are valued because they give information. moment the character of a mystery. Any photograph has
They tell one what there is; they make an invent ory. To multiple meanings; indeed, to see sornething in the forrn of
spies, meteorologists, coroners, archaeologists, and other in- a photograph is to encounter a potential obiect of fascina-
formation professionals, their value is inestimable. But in tion" The ultirnate wisdom of the photographic image is to
the situations in which most people use photographs, their say: "There is the surface. Now ftink or rather feel, intuit
value as information is of the same order as fiction. The is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it loolcs
information that photographs can give starts to seem very -what
this way." Photographl, which cannot themselves explain
important at that moment in cultural history when everyone anythinS, are inschaustible invitations to deduction, specu-
is thought to have a right to something called news. Photo lation, and fantasy.
graphs were seen a$ a way of giving information to people Photography implies that we know about the world if we
who do not take easily to reading. The Daily News still calls accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite
itself "New York's Picture Newspaper," its bid for populist of understanding, which starts frorn not accepting the world
identity' At the opposite end of the scale, Le Monde, e as it lools. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the
newsPaPer designed for skilled, well-informed readers, runs ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands
no photographs at all. The presumption is that, for such anything from a photograph. Of course, photographs fill in
readers, a photograph could only illustrate the analysis con- blanks in our mental pictures of the present and the past:
tained in an article. for example, facob Riis's images of New Yorlc sgualor in the
A new sense of the notion of information has been con- 1880s are sharply instructive to those unaware that urban
structed around the photographic fmage. The photograph is poverty in late-nineteenth-century Ameri'c:l was really that
e thin slice of sPace as well as time. In e world ruled by Diclcensian" Nevertheless, the camera's rendering of reality
photographic images, all borders ("framing") seem arbi- must always hide more than it discloses. As Brecht points
trary. Anything cen be separated, ciln be made discpntinu- out, a photograph of the Krupp works reveals virtrnlly noth-
ous' from anything else. all that is ne. cessary is to frame the ing about that organization. In contrast to the amorous
subiect differently. (Conversely, anything can be made adia- relation, which is based on how something looks, under-
cent to anything else.) Photography reinforces a nominalist standing is based on how it functions" Anil functioning takes
view of social reality as consisting of small units of an apper- place in time, and must be explained in timi. Only that
ently infinite number-es the number of photographs that which narrates can malce us understand.
could be taken of anything is unlimited. Through photo The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that,
 while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical
or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still
zll photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism,
whether cynical or humanist. It will be a knowledge at
bargain prices-a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of
wisdom; as the act of taking pictures is e semblance of
appropriation, a sernblance of rape. The very muteness of
what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is
what constitutes their attraction and provocativeness. The
omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on
our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded
world with a duplicate one of imag€s, photography makes us
feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience en-
hanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerisrn to
which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn
their citizens into irnage-iunkies; it is the most inesistible
form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for
an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and
celebration of the body of the world all these elernents of
erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in phote
graphs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as
well. It would not be wrong to speak of people havin! e
compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a
way of seeing" Ultimately, having an experience becomes
identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating
in a public event comes more and more to be eguivalent to
looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of
nineteenthcentury aesthetes, Mallarffid, said that every-
thing in the world exists in order to end in e book" Today
everything exists to end in a photograph.