Sontag on Photography

"Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own."  Susan Sontag

The late Susan Sontag wrote a series of essays that should give every photographer pause to reflect. On Photography is a 1977 collection of these essays, originally appearing in the New York Review between 1973 and 1977. Here is an interesting review of her book.

"To photograph people is to violate them...It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed." 

"To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."
 
 "In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it."

"The painter constructs, the photographer discloses."

"Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs."