WORK
On Photography
Sontag's 1977 collection diagnosing how photographic proliferation creates an
ecology of images that replaces reality with representations, producing habituation rather than understanding.
On Photography assembled six essays Sontag published in
The New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977, each examining a different aspect of photography's transformation of perception and moral response. The book argued that photographs do not merely record reality but replace it — that the accumulation of images creates a new reality composed entirely of representations, within which the distinction between image and thing collapses. Sontag identified photography's dual character: it is both a trace ("something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask") and an interpretation (a selection, a
framing, a constructed view). This duality gave photographs documentary authority while concealing their constructed character. The proliferation of images, Sontag argued, produces not enriched perception but anaesthesia — each new image dulling the impact of the previous one, converting the morally urgent into the aesthetically consumable. By the book's end, she had diagnosed an "
ecology of images" spiraling toward saturation, though she held out tentative hope that practices of visual conservation might restore serious seeing.