Like the best philosophy I think Sontag is wrong about a lot of things - like about photographing something being an act of non-intervention, or about photography being a more complete method of appropriation and control than writing - but she is frequently right too and either way her claims are interesting. As a work of philosophy, On Photography successfully made me consider (among other things) the existential implications of a post-photo world and the way in which images are substituted for knowledge.

I realized that in my dreams, I will often watch an interaction between two people and it will take the form of a movie or TV show. In my dream journal I will say, I was watching a movie about these women. In these instances I am seeing the image of them represented in my dream through a mechanical process that I encounter frequently in waking life. Before the image, this wouldn’t have been framed in this way. Image have invaded my subconscious, to the point where I can’t look into another world without contextualizing it as filmic. It’s only thanks to Sontag that I am starting to think about the shift to capturing images as an epistemological leap on par with the development of writing.

Very western, and with its own prejudices and blind spots (for example, the comparison between photography and western painting tradition is sometimes interesting but generally quite stunted). Overall though this is a compelling work about seeing which blows amateur cultural analyses like John Berger’s Ways of Seeing out of the water. It made me wonder what I have never seen photographed, and what I do or do not think exists as a result. Now when I see past what I usually see to whatever is beyond it, I understand that this is a momentary bolt of clarity before the frame clicks back into place.