5 ideas
To photograph something is to take possession of it. The camera turns people and events into objects that can be owned, collected and filed, which gives the holder a feeling of knowledge and control that stands in for any real relationship with what was pictured. The world comes to be treated as a stock of images to be gathered rather than a reality to be lived in.
In July 1945, at age twelve, Sontag came across photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau in a bookstore in Santa Monica. She calls it a 'negative epiphany': something broke that could not be repaired, and her life divided into before and after she saw them. She uses the episode as evidence that a first encounter with images of atrocity can wound deeply, while later encounters with the same kinds of images lose that force.
Photographs of horror shock most the first time they are seen. Each further exposure makes the terrible look more ordinary and familiar, so viewers grow numb rather than more committed to act. A camera that can expose suffering can also, through sheer repetition, anesthetize the audience to it.
Taking pictures lets a person hold experience at a distance. The tourist frames the scene instead of taking it in, and the photographer records an event instead of stepping in to change it. Seen this way, photography is at heart an act of non-intervention, a way of taking part while staying a spectator.
A photograph gives a fragment cut out of time with no causes or context, so it offers 'knowledge at bargain prices': a feeling of knowing without the understanding that only narrative and explanation can provide. Its moral effect depends on a political awareness the viewer already has. Without that awareness, the same image can be read as spectacle, as aesthetic object, or not taken in at all.