‘The consumption of the camera can never be satisfied’ - a truism from Susan Sontag, arguably the most insightful and revolutionary art critic of the twentieth century, taken from her acclaimed book On Photography. Ever since it was published in 1977, it has been the bible of the discipline, packed with enduring ideas about the roles and polemics of the camera in society, from advertising to documentary photography.
In her parting chapter, Sontag tackles the disparate aspects of ‘the image world’ that she recognised in the seventies, notably discussing the insatiable consumption of images within society, ‘to consume means to burn, to use up – and, therefore, to need to be replenished’. In a digital world, we are constantly surrounded by images. With access to a world of photos in the palm of our hand, we can absorb them at a breakneck speed due to a sweeping attention deficit. This consumption that we are subjected to is, undoubtedly, a product of late-stage capitalism as the phenomenon relies so heavily on the proliferation of images, emotions and actions they provoke from the viewer. Capitalism harnesses this power through advertising and uses a culture of image consumption to activate the consumption of tangible goods, not only relying on the absorption of images and photos, but also perpetually promulgating this consumerist cycle.
This infinity of photographs rely on a limitless number of subjects. Nowadays, everything has been photographed from the microscopic all the way to photos from outer space; from mundane life to harrowing human suffering. Sontag discusses the power dynamic between camera and photographer in controlling the photographic subjects at length and - in a world where everything is a subject - everything has been appropriated for a use and thus a capitalist cause. On a deeper level, the freedom from consuming photographs allows the viewer to equate with freedom itself; especially when everything can be viewed through a lens, and therefore is used to suppress social change.
The book concludes with Sontag calling for the conservation of images to terminate the ‘ransacking of the world for photographic treasures’. It caused me to wonder whether the world would be different if we had heeded her warning. Would society be less exhausted by consumerist waste or would our knowledge be limited and therefore be less advanced? Of course, we cannot go back in time and change the way we have consumed images for the last fifty years, but I question whether we even have the power to control the beast now. The totality of the image world means its reach is global, personal, and highly addictive. Capitalism’s control is in the palm of our hand and has eaten our focus like bacteria, meaning that we are allowing it to take advantage of us by playing right into its strengths. Possibly the only antidote is to mitigate our individual consumption and creation of images by conserving and refraining from the reflex of reaching for our phones to capture a moment that we probably will never look at again.