On Photography and Memory: Susan Sontag Revisited
Susan Sontag's On Photography, published in 1977, argued that the camera does not preserve memory but replaces it — that the act of photographing an experience substitutes a permanent image for the fluid, evolving process of genuine recollection. The argument was provocative and, in the smartphone era, prophetic: studies from the University of Fairfield now confirm that photographing objects reduces recall of their details, a phenomenon researchers call the 'photo-taking impairment effect.'
Sontag's central insight was not anti-photography but anti-compulsion. She distinguished between the deliberate photograph — composed, considered, and produced as an act of seeing — and the reflexive photograph, taken not to observe but to collect, to produce evidence of experience rather than to deepen it. The distinction has only grown sharper as smartphones have reduced the friction of image-making to zero, converting photography from a practice requiring skill and intention into an automatic response to novelty.
Her later work, Regarding the Pain of Others, published in 2003, complicated the earlier argument by examining photographs of suffering — war, famine, disease — and asking whether these images produce empathy or compassion fatigue. Sontag concluded that photographs alone cannot generate moral understanding; they require narrative context, historical knowledge, and the viewer's willingness to think beyond the frame. The argument anticipates contemporary debates about the political efficacy of images shared on social media.
The tension between these two books — the first warning that photography replaces experience, the second insisting that certain photographs are morally necessary — represents Sontag's mature position: photography is neither inherently harmful nor inherently valuable, but the culture surrounding it determines whether it serves attention or destroys it.
Both books remain in print through Penguin Modern Classics (https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/susan-sontag), and their relatively brief length — On Photography is under two hundred pages — makes them accessible even to readers unfamiliar with Sontag's broader critical project.
Read On Photography and then spend one week without taking a single photograph. Note what you remember more vividly, what you notice differently, and how the absence of the camera changes your relationship to experience. Sontag's argument is ultimately testable — and the test, conducted honestly, will permanently alter how you use the device in your pocket.
