On Photography

“The Image-World” assesses the big-picture implications of Sontag’s conclusions in the preceding essays. Photography’s use as a tool of colonial tourism, its relationship to the surreal, and its place as the privileged medium of communication in society directly affect how people perceive the world. Sontag posits that an “image-world” lays directly on top of the real world, “like a footprint or a death mask” (120), and that people perceive it as more real than the reality underneath it. She believes that images had a special place in ancient cultures: Images in paintings or sculptures were thought to share the essence of what they depicted. Photographs revive this relationship but usurp the real thing they represent.

The image-world consequently turns everything into information and pre-packaged slices of reality for consumption: The experience of an event, meeting a person, or visiting a famous location are all subsumed under encountering these things through photographs. Sontag believes that photographs are a “way of imprisoning reality” (127) and a way that people access experience in their increasingly alienated, isolated, and indoors lives.

Sontag compares American photography to Chinese photography. Using racially biased, sweeping generalizations about Chinese people, she describes a society that has a fundamentally different relationship to photography.