What Susan Sontag Got Right About Photography, and What She Missed
On Photography was published in 1977 and has not been out of print since. That fact alone suggests Sontag was doing something more than journalism. She was building a framework, and frameworks built well outlast the specific occasions that prompted them. Fifty years on, the book reads as both essential and incomplete — which is a more interesting verdict than either pure endorsement or dismissal.
What Sontag got right was the fundamental argument about photography’s relationship to reality. A photograph is not a neutral record. It is a choice — about what to include, when to press the shutter, how to frame the subject, what to do with the result afterward. The camera does not show reality; it produces a version of reality that carries the authority of the real while being subject to all the same manipulations as any other representation. In 1977, this was a genuine critical intervention against the widespread assumption that photographs were transparent documents. In 2026, it is the starting point for any serious conversation about images.
What she got wrong, or more precisely what she could not have anticipated, is the consequence of ubiquity. Sontag was writing in a world where photographs were still relatively scarce and professionally mediated. The great photojournalists — Cartier-Bresson, Capa, Arbus — made images that most people encountered in edited form in magazines and books. The photograph circulated slowly, through institutional channels, with a chain of human judgment attached to it.
That world is gone. The argument Sontag made about photography’s power to both reveal and anesthetize — her claim that image saturation produces moral numbness — has been tested at a scale she never imagined, and the results are more complicated than her thesis allows. Saturation does produce numbness in some contexts. It also, in other contexts, produces something closer to the opposite: an unprecedented collective witness to events that previously would have been invisible. The footage captured on private phones during political violence, the documentation of environmental destruction by non-professional photographers, the slow accumulation of images that eventually forces a story into public consciousness — none of this fits cleanly into Sontag’s model.
Her most prescient observation, and the one most consistently underread, concerns the social function of photography rather than its epistemological status. She noticed that photographs serve memory differently from how memory actually works — that a photograph of an event can displace the actual memory of it, substituting the image’s fixed version for the fluid, reconstructed thing that memory is. This insight has aged not just well but with increasing urgency as personal photography has migrated from albums to phones to cloud storage systems that algorithmically resurface the past on anniversaries and birthdays, deciding for you what your life looked like.
The book should be read because the questions it asks are still the right questions. The answers require updating.