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Tierra Davis
UWRT 1102
Ella Voltz
29 October 2014
Journal 10
Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conflict,
including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about
photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist
ideology. Her essays and speeches sometimes drew criticism. The New York Review of Books
called her "one of the most influential critics of her generation."
A photograph is an event, which loiters eternity. It is a way of contributing in an event
without being a part of it. Sontag sees the camera and a kind of directed weapon, and the act of
photographing as symbolic shooting, or even raping. Sontag compares photography with rape
because in photography we see people in a manner unattainable to themselves and we gain
knowledge of them that can never be theirs, so photography reifies people into objects that can
be exposed to representative titles. But Photography for Sontag is always an interpretation of the
world and this interpretation, is it the side of the photographer or the person viewing the world
through the lens. Photographers always, unavoidably, enforce their own preferences on their
product simply by choosing where they point their camera and how they point it.
Susan Sontag claims in her passage, On Photography, that photography limits our
understanding of the world. However, the truth is that photography enhanced our understanding
of the world. It allows us to see things that would be otherwise impossible to see. Sontag argues
that photography does not allow people to truly understand things and that it does not teach any

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ethical or political knowledge. The truth is that it deepens our understanding and expands our
knowledge of the world around us. Without photography, people would have no idea of what
surrounded them and what happened before their time. Photography produces a visual history of
the world, thus producing a greater appreciation for it. The main purpose of taking photos is to
relive moments in time or to re-experience an event in history. According to this, the purpose of
photography is to deepen our.