[Sontag's World of Photography]

Photography has been encroaching on our world for the past 200 years, finding it's way into the pockets of American all over, slowly at first, and now at a dizzying rate. It's hard to imagine that when I was first born, cameras took pictures on film, and no one had even imagined putting a camera in a cell phone. By the time I had my first phone, however, it already had a camera put in it, which I pretty much used to try and get selfies with girls I had crushes on. Now, at the age of twenty, I'm using a professional-grade digital DSLR, with more RAM than an 80's computer to take photo's like this:

(Completely shameless plug for the summer project I'm working on)

Photography has taken over. It has saturated every area of our modern world: art, music, surveillance, teaching, training, etc. 

When one steps back and looks at this from a sort of "cosmic view", it becomes rather disturbing. The idea that we take snapshots of time, like this one:

(another shameless plug for my summer project)

and it becomes a sort of reality to us is strange. And when we look at the scope of what is photographed, which at this point (thanks to Google Earth) is everything, photography can suddenly seem like a rather scary subject. 

This seems to the Sontag's tone (besides her pretentious verbage); a wariness of the effect of photography on humanity. But I believe her scope is muddled; she is not clear on her intentions from the beginning, and thus her voice becomes lost in the mix. Is she against photography, like it seems at the beginning of her paragraph? ("Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth." -Sontag, 1). Or does she just wish photography would stay an art. Perhaps I'm just bad at reading (a probability), but it seems Sontag has mixed feelings about the use of photography. 

This is, of course, understandable. Because of the depths to which photography has permeated our world, it is hard to get a conclusive read on it's effects. Photography is used in every field; there are no control groups available. So photography becomes muddled and confusing.

Ultimately, this makes me feel uneasy. What is photography doing to us, as a society, as individuals, as people in relationship, etc. It's difficult to see the effects, because we swim in the water. 

So, in conclusion to this rambling, I guess I'll just quote Phillip Greenspun; "Anyway, People take Pictures."