"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder -- a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."
Identifying with her subjects, Sontag remains sensitive to the highly emotional process which is being photographed. By seeing oneself as the world sees one, there is a sense of loss of the hypothetical image one carries in one's head. That image has proverbially died to the reality of external perception. In an era of political unrest and extreme social injustice, Sontag hopes to help people by showing them how internal suffering cannot remain invisible.
"Needing to have reality confirmed and experienced enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution."
This is Sontag's assessment of the current image craze, which has only become more relevant with time. As an artist, Sontag has no patience for consumerism. She is not interested in presenting an ideal image or in somehow augmenting reality; rather she strives to present the actuality and to maintain integrity of presentation for its own sake.
"To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more -- and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize."
Photographing people suffering, Sontag has noticed the tenuous dichotomy of responses. On one hand, the images may lend awareness and open the door to compassion and human relationship. At the same time, these same images may desensitize the viewer who is unable to comprehend the accompanying sensations to which the image speaks. Unable to appropriately process the visual data, the viewer of such photography may become consumed by a need to replicate the images, as an attempt to process the ideas presented.
“But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris."
In Sontag's philosophy, photography is a more broad category than art. It is its own medium of communication, comparable to language in its diversity of function. In the same way that language can be used to communicate, form art, solve problems, etc., photography may be used to excite, communicate, inform, advertise, etc. It is a diverse field of potential of which art is one possible function.
"Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment."
In her career, Sontag has arrived at the conclusion that viewing photographs is not an effective method of manifesting empathy. Contrary to the likely expectation, sustained exposure to photography leads a person to view the images as objects. The subjects lose their humanity and become their own aesthetic experience in the eyes of the viewer. At a time when image consciousness has consumed the popular media and the advertising industry has overwhelmed daily life, this observation of Sontag's bears striking implications for the millennial audience. A preoccupation with images can lead to a detached and controlling perspective on the surrounding world.
