Ecology of Images

In The You On AI Field Guide

Sontag borrowed the term ecology from environmental science, where it names the study of relationships among organisms and their environment. The metaphor was precise: just as biological organisms exist within ecosystems that shape and are shaped by their activity, human consciousness exists within an image-environment that shapes what can be seen and how it is seen. The ecology is not neutral; it has a direction, a tendency toward proliferation and saturation. Each new image makes the next image less impactful. The accumulation produces not richer perception but thinner perception — the paradox of abundance degrading the very capacity it was meant to enhance.

Peter Szendy's 2025 For an Ecology of Images extends Sontag's framework into the AI age, arguing that the ecology must now account for images produced, processed, and circulated by machines with no human perception involved at any stage. The proliferation Sontag documented in 1977 — troubling but still human-scaled — has been replaced by a proliferation so extreme that it represents a qualitative transformation. AI-generated images now outnumber photographic images by orders of magnitude, and the ratio is widening daily. The ecology is no longer an ecology of human-produced representations but a hybrid system in which algorithmic production and algorithmic circulation constitute the dominant processes, with human attention as a minority activity.

For text, the parallel is precise. You On AI describes a culture in which AI-generated prose is entering the training data of future models, producing a closed loop in which statistical patterns reinforce themselves without external correction. This is the textual equivalent of Szendy's image ecology: a system in which the dominant processes are machine-to-machine, and the human writer or reader is the incidental participant in a discourse whose primary audience is algorithmic. Sontag's pessimism — that no practice of conservation can restore serious attention in such an environment — is the pessimism the builders must confront without the comfort of easy answers.

Origin

Sontag developed the ecological metaphor across the six essays that became On Photography, returning to it most explicitly in the book's final essay, "The Image-World." She had been influenced by Marshall McLuhan's media ecology (though she found his optimism naïve) and by the Frankfurt School's analyses of mass culture (though she rejected their mandarin disdain for popular forms). The synthesis was her own: an ecology that was neither celebration nor condemnation but description of a system that had achieved autonomy from the intentions of its participants, operating according to its own logic of proliferation and saturation.

Key Ideas

Self-Reinforcing Proliferation. The ecology of images operates through positive feedback — each image creating appetite for more, photographic coverage becoming the measure of importance, the unphotographed becoming invisible.

Habituation through Abundance. Repeated exposure to images of the morally urgent (war, famine, atrocity) produces not sustained outrage but progressive dulling — each image reducing the impact of the next through the sheer fact of accumulation.

Reality as Photograph. The endpoint of the ecological process is the replacement of reality with image-reality — "reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras."

Conservation Practices as Ecology. Sontag's tentative prescription (abandoned by 2003) that practices of serious, sustained, selective attention might restore genuine seeing — an ecology in the original sense, a deliberate tending of the conditions for perception.