ABSTRACT
For Susan Sontag, the camera reduces all actions and subjects to aesthetic superficialities: tools of capitalist consumerism and colonial oppression. On Photography is a non-academic report on photography. The obscurity of Sontag's examples and the lack of illustrations make it difficult to understand. "Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects— unpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real". Photographs are thus integral to the machinations of the Western capitalist system because they stimulate the desire to consume and blind us to the objects of our consumption. In exploring how photographs reinforce the power relations of Western capitalism, the American status quo, Sontag also devotes a small but significant amount of the text to images of atrocities.
