Sontag on Instagram

What would Susan Sontag have thought of Instagram? I posed the question to the Instagram community itself as a caption to an image of her landmark book On Photography. Partly out of the will to answer for her, from her own words, much as she culls an anthology of quotes at the end of On Photography, I pulled together this list of her most relevant quotes and began to reflect on them.

Quotes

 * "unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something 'out there' just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast-form of note-taking, or the shutter-bug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life." (6)


 * "That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed - seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures" (7)


 * "Picture taking is an event in itself and one with ever more peremptory rights- to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on" (11)


 * "Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive" (14)


 * "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves" (14)


 * "Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is no addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; its is is the most most irresistible form of mental pollution." (24)


 * "The view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has informed photography from the beginning" (55)


 * "The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world 'picturesque'" (55)


 * "But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own" (57)


 * "There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened up a new model of freelance activity- allowing each person to display a certain unique, avid sensibility" (89)


 * "Through being photographed, something becomes part of a system of information, fitted into schemes of classification and storage" (156)


 * "The technology that has already minimized the extent to which the distance separating photographer from subjects ... [and] shrunk the interval between sighting the picture and holding it in one's hands (from the first Kodak, when it took weeks for a developed roll of film to be returned to the amateur photographer, to the Polaroid, which ejects the image in a few seconds) " (157)

satisfied: first, because all the possibilities of photograph are infinite; and second, because the project is self-devouring" (179)"
 * "As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. As like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be