Quotes from In Platos Cave

I have felt compelled to re-read On Photography. It has been over 20 years since I first read this book. On Photography, Susan Sontag, Delta Books, NY, 1973

Quotes from the essay, In Plato's Cave

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and,therefore like power. P. 4

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus photography developed in tandem with one of the most charecteristic of modern activities: tourism. P.9

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an apprearance of participation. P. 10

Eventually, people might learn to act out more their aggression with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. P. 15

Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. P. 23