On Photography
Susan Sontag, 1973
An analysis of how photographs have altered the way we look at ourselves and the world, which upon reading completely shattered the way that I had thought about photography. Sontag argues that photography is an incredibly violent act, similar to shooting a gun, and that photographing is essentially an act of murder. Photographs slice out moments and reinforce “a nominalist view of social reality as consisting of small units of an apparently infinite number... through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque.” I responded to this violent shattering of our world by slicing paper frames into many pieces, folding them, piling them up and scanning them. The title is deconstructed into syllables and arranged to react to the scanned paper structures in space.
