On Photography

“The Image-World” assesses the big-picture implications of Sontag’s conclusions in the preceding essays. Photography’s use as a tool of colonial tourism, its relationship to the surreal, and its place as the privileged medium of communication in society directly affect how people perceive the world. Sontag posits that an “image-world” lays directly on top of the real world, “like a footprint or a death mask” (120), and that people perceive it as more real than the reality underneath it. She believes that images had a special place in ancient cultures: Images in paintings or sculptures were thought to share the essence of what they depicted. Photographs revive this relationship but usurp the real thing they represent.

The image-world consequently turns everything into information and pre-packaged slices of reality for consumption: The experience of an event, meeting a person, or visiting a famous location are all subsumed under encountering these things through photographs. Sontag believes that photographs are a “way of imprisoning reality” (127) and a way that people access experience in their increasingly alienated, isolated, and indoors lives.

Sontag compares American photography to Chinese photography. Using racially biased, sweeping generalizations about Chinese people, she describes a society that has a fundamentally different relationship to photography. In Sontag’s vision of China, photography has a strictly utilitarian function, such as in family photographs or postcards, but has been barred from seeping into everyday life and usurping reality. Sontag uses the example of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary Chung Kuo, Cina, a film that explores China without interviews and relies heavily on filming people in public places without their permission. Chinese people considered Antonioni a thief who stole something from them without permission. Sontag uses this version of China as an example of a society’s possible relationship with photography beyond consumerism.

Sontag concludes that photography’s packaging of experiences, its use in colonial tourism, and its relationship to art are all products of an industrial, capitalist society aimed at profiteering. Photography and cinema offer an endless stream of profit by repackaging experiences to consume. Because people don’t literally consume these experiences like other commodities, photography offers an endless plethora of experiences to sell for profit. Sontag believes that photography in a consumerist society will always turn on and cannibalize itself to become a meta-medium that relies on endlessly referencing itself and becoming more-real than the real world.