On Photography
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.
In the AI Story
The book appeared at the moment when photography had achieved complete cultural legitimacy — museum exhibitions, academic programs, critical apparatuses treating photographs as artworks rather than mere documents. Sontag's intervention was to question the terms of this legitimacy, arguing that photography's status as art had obscured its more consequential function as the primary mechanism through which reality was being converted into spectacle. The Vietnam War was the first war to be comprehensively photographed for television; Sontag argued the images did not produce opposition to the war but a spectatorial relationship to it. The photograph became the thing itself — the napalmed girl running down the road was not a person whose suffering demanded response but an image whose formal properties could be appreciated, debated, and filed away.
For the AI moment, On Photography provides the structural template for understanding what happens when the trace relationship collapses entirely. AI-generated images are not photographs; they bear no indexical connection to reality. They are statistical syntheses trained on millions of images, producing surfaces that resemble photographs without having been produced by the process (light, chemistry, time) that gives photographs their documentary authority. The ecology Sontag described — already pathological in 1977 — has been transformed into something she could not have anticipated: an ecology in which the majority of images are produced without any consciousness having encountered any reality. Machines generate images. Machines process them. Machines circulate them. And the human, if present at all, is the incidental viewer of a discourse conducted between statistical processes.
The framework extends to text. AI-generated prose is interpretation without trace — it has been processed into coherent argument, but the processing has removed every trace of the thinking that would have produced understanding rather than mere articulation. The builder who accepts AI prose as her own thought is making the same error as the viewer who accepts a photograph as reality: confusing the representation with the encounter, the processed surface with the resistant material. Sontag's insistence on the difference is the insistence the AI age needs most.
Origin
Sontag began writing about photography in the early 1970s, initially for commissioned essays that became the book's opening chapters. The project grew more ambitious as she recognized that photography was not one art among others but a technology that had reorganized perception itself. She read widely in the theory and history of photography (Beaumont Newhall, John Szarkowski, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes) while maintaining a skeptical distance from the medium's champions, who treated photography's democratization of image-making as an unqualified good. Sontag saw the democratization as ambiguous at best, catastrophic at worst. The book was a commercial and critical success, controversial for its severity, foundational for subsequent image theory.
Key Ideas
Photography as Trace and Interpretation. Every photograph is simultaneously a mechanical record (light on film) and a constructed view (framing, timing, angle) — a duality that gives it documentary authority while concealing its interpretive character.
The Ecology of Images. The proliferation of photographs creates a self-reinforcing system in which images generate demand for more images, reality becomes what can be photographed, and unmediated experience feels incomplete.
Habituation through Proliferation. Repeated exposure to images of suffering produces not empathy but anaesthesia — each new image reducing the impact of the previous one, converting moral urgency into aesthetic consumption.
Reality Replaced by Representation. The endpoint of the photographic project is not a richer relationship to reality but the replacement of reality with an image-world that is more accessible, more manageable, and less demanding than the real.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Susan Sontag, On Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977)
- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936)
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
- Peter Szendy, For an Ecology of Images (MIT Press, 2025)