Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar, and even more importantly an ethics of seeing . Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge . Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing which means that like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power . Photographs give people an imaginary possession of a part that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure . A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights to interfere with, to invade or to ignore whatever is going on.

From Sontag, Susan. On photography, p3-13. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979