Why We Take Pictures By Susan Sontag Analysis

Though Susan Sontag claims in “Why We Take Pictures” that photography is a defense against anxiety and a tool of power by allowing an individual to control what the subject of the photograph is, thus controlling the environment. Since Sontag wrote her opinion, photography has evolved to be a more casual experience that documents daily life. Through the mass incorporation of social media into our lives and how it allows us to have constant access to others lives and others into our own, we develop a need to share excerpts of our life, but instead of words we use pictures. Photographs today don’t hold as much meaning as they used to before digital cameras or smartphones people developed their photos and created physical photo albums. People also use pictures to intentionally tell history, whether it’s people’s own personal history or the history of our world. There are times when a person takes a picture and they don’t realize what they just did is important, such as photographers at the Ferguson riots or the Boston Marathon bombing.

Photography has become people’s new form of communication, especially with social media incorporated into people’s daily …show more content…
Every day people take pictures to post on their social media and updating their feed to see new pictures of friends and family. The importance of pictures has faded away as our ability to share, delete, and manipulate them is only one button away rather than having to pay to get them developed and feeling obligated to keep even the poorest pictures. Many historical events today are unintentionally recorded by people who had never expected to contribute to a part of history, but they still take pictures and videos to document the experience. Taking photographs has become a casual experience for people today with having high-powered cameras in are back pockets all the