A: "Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality." That's an oft-quoted bit from On Photography, the influential 1977 essay collection by Susan Sontag. She argued that photography is a way of "refusing" to absorb new environments and experiences "by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir." Also: "Essentially, the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own." ¶ On and on Sontag went, description how the innocent-seemingly act of snapping pictures degrades what's photographed and detaches us from the world. And this was three decades before phonecams transformed photography from "widely practiced amusement," as Son-tag put it, to omnipresent, mindless tic.
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