Gregisdead121 ’s Reviews > On Photography > Status Update

"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish
vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize
the injuries of class, race, and sex. The camera’s twin
capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these
needs and strengthen them."

"Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional
weight depends on where it is inserted. "

"Many people are anxious when they’re about to be photographed: not
because they fear, as primitives do, being violated but because they fear the
camera’s disapproval. People want the idealized image: a photograph of
themselves looking their best. They feel rebuked when the camera doesn’t
return an image of themselves as more attractive than they really are. "

"Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To
photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see
themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns
people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is
a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder"

"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting
oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and,
therefore, like power."

on photography
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television
programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the
image is also an object