How Does Photography Alter Our Perspective

The second way in which Sontag contends that photographs alter our perspective is desensitizing by way of overexposure. She argues that constant exposure to graphic imagery has a numbing, anesthetizing effect on us. Sontag writes “Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised--- partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror.”, meaning that these images shock and horrify but also influence and foster an environment of depravity. Sontag later elaborates by saying, “To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with a photographic images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them”, she reiterates

Sontag feels that photography endears itself to voyeurism, exploitation, and an imperceptible aggression. Sontag expresses this when she writes, “Still there's something predatory the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by taking knowledge of them they can never have, it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”, here Sontag shines a light on the often invasive nature of photography. Capturing an image is a way of symbolically capturing a part of that person, which is forever frozen in that moment recorded on film. Sontag also argues that photographing an individual is a way of participating in that person's eventuality (death). She writes “To take a photograph is to participate in another person's or things mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”, so essentially Sontag argues photographs serve as a physical reminder of the inevitable corrosion that time visits upon all things. To photograph a loved one, a pet, a cherished place or thing is an inadvertent reminder that, that person, place or thing will inevitably age, decay and cease to be. This appropriation is often done unintentionally but is appropriation nonetheless and aids in altering our outlook and