On Photography

Sontag’s exploration of photography’s relationship to art requires an understanding of Americans’ views on art pre-photography. Walt Whitman, one of America’s preeminent and original poets, is often considered a paradigm and visionary for American art. His “euphoric humanism” sought to democratize the American experience by flattening every individual’s experience into one coherent, unified American experience. His views required dignifying and beautifying every experience in the US, including those traditionally deemed ugly or undignified. These views intrinsically linked personal identity with national identity and characterized America as a proud beacon for unity and democracy. Sontag’s literary analysis of Whitman’s work allows her to view photography through the lens of humanism. Whitman is the foundational thinker of American optimism, and Sontag focuses on how US culture views photography; drawing a logical parallel from Whitman to photography thus strengthens and contextualizes her argument.

However, Sontag views photography as a deeply ironic fulfillment of Whitman’s humanism. She asserts that “paper ghosts and a sharp-eyed witty program of despair” are all that is left of “Whitman’s discredited dream of cultural revolution” (38), alluding to photography’s takeover of art and media. This “program of despair” comes from the US commitment to “big business and consumerism” (38) in the wake of World War 1. This hyper-consumerism, alluding to the theme of Consumerism and Contemporary Life, fulfills Whitman’s dream by “democratizing” all experience, which Sontag explores in “The Heroism of Vision.”

The democratization of experience turns the US into a melancholic series of photographs that document “discontinuity, detritus, loneliness, greed, sterility” (38). The discontinuity of reality underlying photographic realism is a key concept in Sontag’s essays. The “Whitmanesque appetites” of photographers fragment reality into bite-sized, photographic pieces. Sontag views Whitman’s idealistic humanism as an ideology that persists in the US landscape. She uses this paradoxical stance of juxtaposing two realities that seem quite different to exacerbate and highlight the qualities of photography important to her arguments.

Artistic vision realigns along the spectrum of what is photographable and photogenic and what isn’t, emphasizing the theme of Art and Power Dynamics. As Sontag later shows in “The Image-World,” this way of looking at the world fragments people’s understanding of reality and privileges the parts that can be photographed. Sontag views cameras as a device that simultaneously democratizes America under Whitman’s literary humanism while also commodifying the world in the form of photographs. Sontag writes that the photographer “now patronizes reality” (38), whereas Whitman was confined to the realm of ideas. The patronization of reality alludes to the ever-expanding markets of photography that consume reality in “The Image-World” essay and supports Sontag’s theme of Surveillance and the Perception of Reality.