On Photography

“Heroism of Vision” turns to the middle-class photographer’s self-perception, which Sontag continues in “Photographic Evangels.” The unique importance that photographs give to vision and visual sensory information structures reality in a way that privileges the photograph, paving the way for Sontag’s image-world. After a brief historical exploration of photographers who saw photography as either art or science, Sontag proposes that photographic vision paves the way for consumerism and hyper-surveillance. She writes that “photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks” in order to maintain its relevancy as an avant-garde medium “so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision” (77). Sontag frames Arbus’s photography as an exercise in facing “life’s horror” without flinching. In “Plato’s Cave,” she says that photography “has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary” (15). The heroism of the celebrated photographer that she explores in “Heroism of Vision” sets the boundaries of “ordinary” and violates these boundaries repeatedly to desensitize people to horrible images and ingrain them in everyday living. The photographic perspective on vision is a middle-class exercise in taking in the suffering of the world as a sort of contest to determine who is more able to stomach “reality.”

Photography accomplishes this desensitization and constant volley of shocks through depoliticizing and decontextualizing the world. The revolutionary Che Guevara’s funeral photos became an object of depoliticized beauty despite his infamous reputation in the US. Sontag considers this the ultimate function of photography: If everything comes down to beauty and/or horror, then images can proliferate as both a means of surveillance and a commodity. Endlessly pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable to photograph and consume opens more “markets” for various visual media and consumer goods based on photography.

“Heroism of Vision” weaves together all the book’s central themes—Surveillance and the Perception of Reality, Art and Power Dynamics, and Consumerism and Contemporary Life—by showing that Sontag’s concerns about surveillance, cultural power, and hyper-consumerism all benefit from constant desensitization of the population. Depoliticization and boundary-pushing are key to creating a spectacle society (see: Index of Terms). The photographer’s “heroism” is a kind of proliferation of the distanced, middle-class viewpoint that Sontag established in “Melancholy Objects.” Her underlying assumption is that the post-war middle class thrives on spectacle as a means of both entertainment and identity-crafting. Sontag was a political leftist, and On Photography is partly a political project. She shows that “heroism of vision” is a caustic and nihilistic perspective that seeks to reduce the world to spectacle and a “department store” of consumable goods (85). This essay is a rebuttal to other leftist theorists who hoped that photographs might have helped instill revolutionary ideas into society. Sontag’s reference to Che’s funeral photos is a scathing criticism of photography’s ability to mean anything or have use in politics that stray from the status quo. Since photography is inherently reactionary, she argues, it can only affirm the status quo.