on photography

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
 
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.



Susan Sontag