On Photography

“Photographic Evangels” explores the rhetoric and persuasive techniques used by photography’s proponents to justify its existence both as an everyday practice and as a fine art. Echoing Sontag’s moralist/scientist split, photograph evangelists argue that there are two ways of viewing photography: Photography is either a “lucid and precise act of knowing” or a “pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter” (90). Sontag calls both of these approaches “photographic realism.” Photographic realism asserts that truth is hidden and that the camera might find what’s “really” there, whether that truth is the photographer’s subjective experience or scientific knowledge. Sontag believes that these rhetorical approaches to photography shape perceptions of “realism” and thus what is real.

Sontag briefly explores the history of rhetoric that photography’s defenders use. Photographers have always detested the aggressive language surrounding cameras, such as “take” or “capture” a photograph instead of “making” a photograph. The desire to use benevolent language around photograph creation gives photographers more license to engage in the colonial tourism Sontag outlined previously. Photographers initially defended photographs as a fine art form. As photography became more widely available, however, they became indifferent toward the question of art and rejected it entirely.