Susan Sontag

Recently I have read 'On Photography' by Susan Sontag, to get a better understanding of photography itself as a medium. Sontag generally raises issues of a photographic world replacing the real one, and talks about a culture that is becoming increasingly obsessed with images. Sontag talks about photography as a replacement of reality. We have become reliant on photographs as a way of preserving and freezing moments of time. Images are everywhere - and we regularly experience things through photographs before we experience them in reality. An example of this would be holiday brochures: - we don't need to go to the place to experience it when we have a photograph. This also takes away from the virginity of a new experience. Since the invention and ever widening use of social networking sites I think this has gone to another level - I, and many others in my generation, see so many photos of our friends' daily lives now that we almost live through them, and they become our own memories too. We are constantly looking at other people's memories. I think social networking sites really confuse and blur the line between individual and collective memory, as we blog our own personal thoughts and photos, but this gets framed alongside everybody else's and becomes a wider, more collective narrative reflecting today's times. I find myself sharing in my friends' experiences through their photographs. As Sontag states: 'essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.'

In terms of photography in relation to memories, Sontag states that photographs are 'not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement', highlighting that photography can be used as a replacement of memory, but it will never be that memory. 'Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it.  But this is the opposite of understanding'. This is interesting in terms of preserving memories, as we have become reliant on photography as a way of freezing moments and serving as a reminder or explanation of the past, but we can't always believe that what we see in a photograph is a true reflection - seeing a memory is not the same as understanding it, feeling it and recalling it involuntarily. That would be what we truly remember, if our memory hasn't been infiltrated by photographs. Sontag states: 'of course, photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and future', further emphasising that photographs do act as a replacement of memory some instances. In my own work I am interested in this idea of seeing a memory in photographs, or at least certain parts of it being replaced by photographs; whether that be our personal photographs or ones that we have seen in mass media, or possibly more commonly nowadays, on social media sites. I am intrigued by the struggle of what we actually remember and what has just been filled in by photographs.