While Sontag does not think photography is art, she does think that it makes what it photographs into art, which is its unique quality. Photos can be aesthetic or they can be informative either one can be used to serve capitalism by making peoples’ image consumption make them believe 1) that images and reality are the same, and 2) that their choice between images is actually freedom.
Photography as a way of making the world more available to us, going along with making others’ suffering and lives in general more available, feeds into the function of photos as consumable objects. However, surrealist photos that rely on their content for effect are not actually surreal or rather, every photograph is surreal, because every photo is creating an artificial world. Unlike other forms of art, photos are only enhanced by the passage of time their effects (like bloom, shadow, etc.) are less important to their overall effect than distance and time, which are what make a photo truly “surreal”. While photographs seems like reality, they are actually more like paintings: they don’t reflect reality, they reflect the “real”, or the interpretation of reality that their photographer has shaped and captured.
Sontag’s essays on photography revolve around the question of what photography is, and what it does.
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