on photography

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world – all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography (via invisiblestories) (via teachingliteracy) (via booklover)I have always admired photographers for their ability to capture a scene or a moment that somehow conveys the true meaning of what the eye is seeing. A photograph is permanent, something that’s on record and cannot be undone. For better or worse that photograph will be viewed and analyzed and it is always there even as the image in the mind fades away. I once thought, I might be a photographer. I might enjoy capturing moments.

Now I keep no photographs. The problem was they were always there, and I knew it in my mind, even as the memories began to fade.