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Susan Sontag

from 12 - Technology, Progress, and Environment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2022

Patricia Owens
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Katharina Rietzler
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
Kimberly Hutchings
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Sarah C. Dunstan
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Summary

We linger unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, our age-old habit, in mere image of the truth. But being educated by photographs isn’t like being educated by older, more crafted images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around claiming our attention. Daguerre started the inventory, with faces, and since then just about everything has been photographed; or so it seems. This very instability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as anthology of images.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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