5/31/2023 0 Comments Sontag susan on photographyMovies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out but with still photographs the image is also an object, light-weight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.
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