[In On Photography Sontag suggests that] photography is an aggressive, appropriating act (one shoots/takes a picture) which "makes reality atomic, manageable, opaque … denies interconnectedness, continuity … confers on each moment the character of a mystery." Alienating us from direct experience, the photo provides a more intense second-hand experience, an illusion of knowledge; essentially discrete, disjunct, mute, ahistorical, the photo cannot tell the truth that comes only from words and narration. Photography levels hierarchies, fosters seeing for seeing's sake…. Along with modernizing and surrealizing our perspective on reality, however, the camera also consumerizes it. The world becomes "a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation." And governments exploit the photographic image as another medium for capitalist ideologies….

Sontag's six essays—really linked meditations or even prose poems—all take up these themes again and...