People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers...Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged to gradually give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something.

Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Me, Dried Mud in Corrales, New Mexico

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

...Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing - which means that, like every mass art form,photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Arthur Rothstein, Car in a Duststorm, 1930s depression era

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity - and ubiquity - of the photographic record is photography's 'message', and its aggression.

Images which idealize...are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness...There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Equivalent series, Alfred Stieglitz

More R.v.R.

Maniacs of the written word can always find something to disagree about.

[I had to] accept the world as God had made it, not as I thought that he ought to have made it or as I would have made it if I had been given the chance.

The most intelligent of men must be crazy on some one point to be really well-balanced and a useful member of society.

And finally, when the author's efforts at doctoring mankind had failed --

I had tried to benefit mankind...to the best of my ability. I had tried to be of some service to those who were less fortunate than I. And they had risen in their wrath and had destroyed me because I had dared to deprive them of what was dearer to them than life itself -- their misery.

~ With heartfelt thanks to Mr. Hendrick van Loon, a brilliant man in any age. And as all brilliant men - and women - must be, misunderstood by all but his closest friends.