Susan Sontag's On Photography

Phorography has started in around 1839 (CITE) and since then it has become widespread, if not integrated into us human society's. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term as: "the art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface." Just like every other art forms that exist, photography is subjected to much of the critics' debate and speculation, not only of its technicality but also its meaning and practice; among those people are Susan Sontag, a prominent writer and John Berger, an influential art critic. On the impact of photography, Sontag believed it has expanded our horizon, while at the same time Berger agreed with her that photography it has made us more critical in our living, though their reasonings, of which we will take a look at, take different directions. In her book On Photography, a meditation about photography, Sontag made the point that the photographs have expanded our scope of the world giving us an awereness of our position as well as the others. To demonstrate this point, she mentioned the Plato's cave, an allegory about man's perception is limited to what they see, like a prisoner chained in a cave will only see flicker of shadows on the wall; and she wrote: "This very insatiability of the

The lesson comes firstly from Berger. He wrote:

Very frequently (the photographs) are used tautologically so that the photograph merely repeats what is being said in words. Memory is not unilinear at all. Memory works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event. (...) If we want to put the photograph back into the context of experience, social experience, social memory, (...) We have to situate the photograph so that it acquires something of the surprising conclusiveness of that which was and