The Real Prisoner: The Photographer

An analysis of the “Pluto’s Cave” chapter by Susan Sontag.

I want to start this article with the quote,

“When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures”

by Susan Sontag.

Today, everyone has a phone with a proper camera or at least one digital camera, some even have a Polaroid and analog camera to go along with it. We take pictures every day, multiple times a day. In my opinion, this stems from our extreme fear of losing moments forever.

Fear of understanding that a moment was important later on, not having a physical or digital copy of it, and eventually forgetting how that moment felt or looked like.

Especially in times like these, where trends are changing at lightning speed, our attention spans consist of 30 seconds of TikTok videos, and everyone has suddenly tuned into their creative endeavors, it feels utterly important for us to document every minute of our lives almost to have “proof” that we exist and have a piece of us live on after.

We have a need to be remembered, however, being remembered means sacrificing our own memories and experiences only to replace them with a digital commemoration almost too scared to just live without the protection of the camera in between us and the world.

“A way of certifying experience, but also a way of refusing it”

And although we take a lot of photographs of our every day, we are still unstable

narrators of our own stories.

When a simple crop of a photograph can imply different meanings, no one can understand our life through photographs but only have implications on what it may have been like.

Photography has turned into an almost perverted prison for people, objects, or memories, making them passive, and we are merely addicted consumers.

The camera intrudes and trespasses from a distance; when the photographer is taking a picture, they actively choose to eternize a slice of time with no place for consent.

However, the question that I ponder over is whether the photographers are the real prisoners being trapped by their own need to capture (“shoot”), slowly turning into nothing more than voyeurs looking from the outside in on life only through a Fujifilm camera lens.

Coming back to the quote I mentioned at the start, I think now, when we are afraid of being nostalgic, we take pictures, therefore we shoot.