On photography and tourists: comments on a text by Susan Sontag

   © From a text by Andrew Milne

Seeing the large number of tourists that swarm in all the places worth visiting, all equipped with cameras and phones, I remembered Susan Sontag's book “Photography”. I cannot reproduce what she wrote without infringing copyright, I reproduce fragments of the comments that Andrew Milne makes on the website theconversation.com (which does authorize their reproduction). Comments that summarize Sontag's thinking in relation to this topic. Milne's article is longer and goes into depths that we cannot reproduce here.

Milne writes: this year marks 50 years since Susan Sontag’s essay Photography was published in the New York Review of Books… perhaps nowhere is Sontag’s enduring relevance as a critic clearer than in the essay’s analysis of photography as both a symptom and a source of our pathological relationship to reality. Sontag described photography as “a defense against anxiety”. She saw that it had become a coping mechanism. Confronted with the chaotic surfeit of sensation, we retreat behind the protection of the camera, whose one-eyed, one-sensed perspective makes the world seem maniable.

Sontag claimed that we photograph most when we feel most insecure, particularly when we are in an unfamiliar place where we don’t know how to react or what is expected of us. Taking a photograph becomes a way of attenuating the otherness of a place, holding it at a distance.

Tourists use their cameras as shields between themselves and whatever they encounter. According to Sontag, photography gives the tourist’s experience a definite structure: “stop, take a photograph, and move on.”

Having taken a photograph, we think of its subject as our captive: it’s there now, on the film, in the camera’s memory. This can make us inept observers. There is no need to experience something now, as we can always review it later. So we grab and run.

Photography is a way of testifying I saw this, I was there. A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Through photography, Sontag argued, we sooner or later become tourists in our own reality. We have become discontents on the perpetual lookout for content. Photographic promiscuity is now one of our mores. It’s what we do: we shoot everything, not least ourselves.

Sontag says that “taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world.” Her claim is that photography has reframed the way we see the world and our place in it. She wrote that photographs have the effect of “making us feel that the world is more available than it really is”…She argues that “it is not reality that photographs make immediately accessible, but images”.

Sontag’s purpose was, broadly speaking, ethical. She was concerned with our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. She thought that photographs were displacing us. It is not that the far has drawn nearer, but that everything is held at an equal distance. Our sense of situatedness has been upset. We are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere – an all-seeing, incorporeal eye. Our sense of orientation, our sense of what is relevant to us, has diminished. This may give a false impression of Sontag’s argument. Her political commitment is beyond question (just read about her 1968 visit to North Vietnam, or her 1993 staging of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo). She was certainly not trying to justify inattention or insularity.

Sontag’s objection is primarily to the way we are transformed into, as she writes elsewhere, “customers or tourists of reality”. Our responsibility becomes perpetual consumption of what is served up by the media. We relate to the world beyond the media as if it were media, as if it were content.

Contact demands more than an image hitting the eye. It requires immersion, it requires physicality, it requires understanding. Sontag envisages a responsibility beyond that of the so-called “concerned spectator”, whose attention she describes elsewhere as “proximity without risk”.

We linger unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, our age-old habit, in mere image of the truth.