Susan Sontag begins her article with a brief introduction to Walt Whitman’s dream of cultural revolution. In his assertion, Whitman maintains that discriminations of value seemed to be trivial and snobbish. He stated that individuals would not care about beauty or ugliness if they embraced a sufficiently large quantity of the American experience. However when the cultural revolution failed to occur, the American arts no longer were demystified but instead demystified experience themselves. In the next couple of paragraphs, Sontag discusses the history of photography and its original purpose. This purpose was to capture ideal images. Therefore, photographs were supposed to be beautiful. In the 1920s, photographers began to drift away from these
