From “On (Digital) Photography: Sontag, 34 Years Later”:
Photography is a kingdom of glamour and banality. The photograph, whatever its cultural pedigree, does not so much exalt the everyday as establish the aesthetic parameters, the peaks and troughs, of everydayness. The camera may record astounding events or reveal shocking truths, but always within the context of the ordinary, the literal, the real.
As Roland Barthes put it in “Camera Lucida,” his graceful and disarmingly poignant meditation on the nature of the art, the photograph always says the same thing: “That has happened.” Which means that every photograph is equivalent even as each one is distinct, and that they all capture a precise present and register its conversion into an irretrievable past. Photography is the definitively modern, technologically relentless engine for the mass production of nostalgia. Video may be live, instantaneous, perpetually current, but a still photograph takes up instant residence in the archive. It gives you not the gratifications of immediacy, which moving pictures deliver so readily, but rather a teasing and endlessly seductive sense of distance.
[Barthes] was less troubled by this prospect than Sontag, whose prose, in the final pages of “On Photography,” ripples with alarm. “Images are more real than anyone could have supposed,” she wrote. She warned that our consciousnesses, individual and collective, were in danger of being overwhelmed, our aesthetic and ethical senses dulled and muddled, by an ever-intensifying blizzard of mechanically produced pictures. How would we be able to sort through them all, to decode their messages and judge their merits? How would we know what was real? “We consume images at an ever faster rate,” Sontag observed, and the more we do, the more “images consume reality.”