On Photography

In the summer of 2005, while crossing Montparnasse Cemetery, I came across what looked like a small overgrown herb garden at the end of a tree-lined alley. Tucked between the plants, I found a discreet sign identifying the wild patch of greenery as Susan Sontag’s grave. I was stunned—unexpectedly confronted with the ghost of someone I had idolized and whose recent passing I was still mourning. What was she doing here in Paris—the place of her resting barely identified by a marker? Unable to believe my own eyes, I did what most tourists do when they encounter something they do not comprehend: I took out my digital camera and shot a picture of the makeshift gravesite.

“All photographs are memento mori,” Sontag wrote in the first chapter of On Photography. “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

Only after the fact did I realize that my behavior upon discovering Sontag’s gravesite had been a textbook demonstration of what she had observed as a literary theorist and art critic: taking photographs is a way to certify an experience but also to refuse it, by converting the moment into an image, a souvenir, a thing of beauty.

Published in 1977, as a collection of essays reprinted (in a slightly different form) from The New York Review of Books, On Photography is a prophetic book whose chilling analysis describes the way photography, more than ever, mediates our experience of reality but also controls it. Webcams, iPhones, video-conferencing, Skype conversations, surveillance cameras, intimate pictures showing up on Facebook (just to name some of the phenomena that define our time), are evidence that “through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers.”

Within months of my first visit to Sontag’s grave, the herb garden was replaced by a black marble slab with a severe black marble gravestone on top of it. The highly polished surface of the monument is as shiny as the coating of a piece of negative film. I fancy that this memorial acts as a huge photographic plate recording the ever-changing Parisian sky, not as a still picture but as the fluid expression of a fugitive reality.