On Photography

Walter Benjamin used montages of quotes in The Arcades Project as his primary means of scholarship. Benjamin was fascinated by the act of collecting and believed that a collector could create meaning out of collected items solely by how they chose to display their objects. Placing a particular sculpture next to a particular painting could elicit new feelings or ideas in viewers. Similarly, Benjamin believed that new meaning could be synthesized from placing quotations, historical snippets, and other short excerpts next to one another. Sometimes, juxtaposing two distinct objects against one another may affect how a viewer sees both objects because of their positional relationship to each other. Benjamin calls these epiphanies and sudden new perspectives “lightning flashes.” This technique is known as montage in film. The ability of montage to create “lightning flashes” of new meaning was famously proven in Lev Kuleshov’s experiments with montage in the 1910s, now referred to as the Kuleshov Effect.

Sontag practices Benjamin’s excerpt-montage technique to produce “lightning flashes” for readers in hopes that they can better understand her positions on photography. The variety of sources cited reveals Sontag’s preoccupations when constructing her anthology. The plethora of advertisements grounds photography as a commodity, a consumerist object in between lofty quotes from famous photographers on the purpose of photography. Advertisement lines such as “It won’t let you stop. Suddenly you see a picture everywhere you look” (155) and “It’s hard to tell where you leave off and the camera begins” (146) portray the camera as invasive, all-consuming, and encroaching on a person’s sense of self. Quotes from others, such as Diane Arbus’s “the camera is a kind of license” (149) and Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “[t]he media have substituted themselves for the older world” (158) reinforce Sontag’s claim that photography has consumed and reshaped the world entirely. While the advertisements erode the border between camera and person, both theorists and photographers are quoted on the fundamental ubiquity of cameras in contemporary consumerist society, again touching on the theme of Consumerism and Contemporary Life. Sontag uses the anthology of quotations to reinforce this and the collection’s other main themes—Art and Power Dynamics; Surveillance and the Perception of Reality—through “lightning flashes” that would be impossible in a typically structured essay.