This is an AI-generated photo. I don’t own the copyright to this, either, and use it for educational purposes only.

I first read On Photography by Susan Sontag back in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan lived in the White House. I was living in New York City and working for scientific publishing companies as an “editorial assistant” — a fancy title for proofreader.

I went into the office every day, sat down, and read fairly dry, technical material about aeronautics and engineering for eight hours. Then I stood up and walked down 5th Avenue, three miles back to the Path train to Jersey, since, even then, a working person couldn’t afford NYC rent.

I liked the job because it left me with tremendous energy at the end of the day. You’d think I’d burn out on reading, but I didn’t. It didn’t wear out my brain.

The only part of me that was tired after work was my eyeballs, from moving back and forth on reams of text, my consciousness trained not on the meaning of material I wasn’t expected to understand, but on surface errors, which I was expected to catch and correct.

I worked with new college grads, all English majors. On breaks and after work, we often stopped at a bookstore to pick up more reading material to read on the train. It was a time when people still read books, newspapers, and magazines on trains.

We discussed art openings and shared info on upcoming poetry readings. Without the internet, we had bookstores, broadsides on walls and bulletin boards, The New York Review of Books, and the New York City Public Library.

We wanted to be in NYC because it was the greatest literary hub in the world, and, in our twenties, we didn’t care if we made crap wages reading boring stuff. We were Just Starting Out.

We were all more than a bit unusual, for our age group and for the times, and we really didn’t care.

Chinatown

When I first saw NYC’s Chinatown, the color and life of the streets made my brain explode. I bought a cheap Vivitar camera. I remember how much it cost — $29.99, a large chunk of my weekly paycheck.

One man, a total stranger, mocked me because I was a young woman taking pictures.

I wasn’t taking pictures of people I knew, like a nice young lady; I was taking pictures of strangers, buildings, and food. I wasn’t using a fancy camera, and back then, I looked like my stylists were Patti Smith and Neil Young.

I was a woman who wanted to look at the world instead of expecting the world to look at her.

Back then, I didn’t get it. I thought, only certain people are allowed to take pictures?

This got me thinking there was something particularly daring about taking pictures. It seemed to me then a subversive act. It was weirder than the other arts. There was something about the act of photography that jumped off a trampoline and did somersaults in the air.

I had not previously realized that taking pictures, back when not everyone had a camera, was performative. Standing on the street, I was necessarily drawing attention to myself, to the unfeminine act of doing, of creating.

The audacity of Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag would not have been perturbed by a man who taunted her for taking pictures, or being a professional writer, or for having her first sexual encounter with a woman at the age of 16, or graduating from the University of Chicago at 18, then embarking on graduate studies at Harvard, Oxford, and ultimately the Sorbonne.

While re-reading On Photography, published in 1977, I have been reading her journals, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, published in 2008. The diaries are a remarkable record of a precocious teenage girl.

She was all of 15 when she wrote a list of books she needed to read including The Counterfeiters by Gide, Diary of a Writer by Dostoevsky, along with more than a dozen other weighty tomes, as well as “poems of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Tibullus, Heine, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire.”

And in 1948, only an exceptionally courageous teenager could come to terms with her own “lesbian tendencies,” as she called them, and write about her sexual experiences, even in a journal.

Photographer as aggressor

In the first chapter of On Photography, “In Plato’s Cave,” Sontag writes about how photography constructs the modern environment: “[P]hotographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.”

Photographs are not statements but pieces of the world, “miniatures of reality that anyone can make and acquire.” They can provide evidence, “incontrovertible proof that a given thing has happened.”

But all photography, she says, is far more; it is a form of aggression: “From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope.”

In the early days, it was a toy of very wealthy people; there were no professional photographers, so “there could not be amateurs, either . . . ”

Most people don’t practice photography as art. It is a “social rite,” that helps people “take possession of a space in which they are insecure.” In a disaster, only the photographer holds a camera to “his” eye; he looks “self-possessed, is almost smiling.”

Self-possession and aggression are not very feminine postures. She quotes Diane Arbus on the act of taking pictures: “When I first did it, I felt very perverse.”

So, that long-ago question was answered the first time I read the book: Taking pictures of anything other than your friends and family is, or was, for women, a subversive act.

I am reminded of something Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, said somewhere, that women wearing eyeglasses are less attractive because glasses announce that she prioritizes her need to see over her expected need to display her face to men. They emphasize doing over merely being.

Women were not, in the mid-1960s when McLuhan was writing, supposed to have their own needs. Eyeglasses slapped the male gaze: A woman was not, actually, a plastic doll.

Even by the early 1980s, it was still out of the ordinary for a woman to “point,” “aim,” and “shoot,” “capturing” images with the phallic extension of vision that is a camera.

The naked truth

I would love to hear what Sontag would say about drones, deepfakes and AI-generated images. They would, I suspect, make her skin crawl, as they do mine. Unfortunately, she died in 2004 at the age of 71. But we can make guesses based on her stance in the book.

Whether cameras can lie is a question that has been settled. It was not always so.

When the technique for retouching negatives was displayed in Paris in 1855 at the Exposition Universelle, the idea of getting one’s picture taken became much more appealing to the masses, she writes.

Nevertheless, “A fake photograph (one that has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsified reality ... Astute observers noticed that there was something naked about the truth a photograph conveyed, even when its maker did not mean to pry.”

Photographs are intended to bring out the subject’s character in a way no painter can. They are supposed to focus on what she calls “the body of the world,” on its curves, angles and shapes, colors, gradations of light and shade.

“The photographer was thought to be a very good but passive observer — a scribe, not a poet.” — Sontag

Yes, cameras can lie. But when we look at an image we identify as a photograph, the subject of the picture is dominant in our perception of it, she writes.

This is not necessarily true in painting; she points out that when we look at something labeled as a photograph, we respond by first trying to identify what it is. For visually educated people, from the early 20th century onward, this is not the first question one asks about a painting.

Photography records pieces of reality

I went back to Sontag to try to discover what she would think about an image produced by an AI image generator and presented as a photograph. I don’t own the copyright to the image on the previous page. It was the output of my typed instructions to an AI image generator: “A group of young people in New York City in the 1980s.”

AI has an obvious problem with reality.

At best, AI-generated images, whether “photos” or “art” are an amalgamation of stolen photos, “scraped” from images on the internet to feed an industry with a projected market value of $407 billion by 2027. They have done this without any regard for such niceties as copyright, without the creators’ prior knowledge, let alone consent, and without compensation.

Each photograph, Sontag writes, “is a piece of the world.” An AI-generated photo is not a piece of the world.

If I take a picture in a back alley, I may doctor it up to express something more about the subject than meets the eye. 

If I take a picture in a back alley, I may doctor it up to express something more about the subject than meets the eye, as in the example above. Given the way I edit — using software that now incorporates AI — I can call it a photograph.

People in the town I live in now, Duluth, Minnesota, are appalled by my bringing such blight to their attention. Even though this alley doesn’t look exactly like this photo, they know this exists. They understand the photo’s message — their city is decaying.

Such a display takes on both the expressive and journalistic aspects of photography. This closed door is what it is, but I want to also express my ideas and feelings about what it is. By doing so, I give this ugly, old door visual interest and make it do what all halfway decent photos do: Make the eyes stop and linger over the picture.

People believe me when I say such a thing exists, because it does. I call it a photograph. If I tell you it’s a photograph, I am telling you I saw the subject matter.

If I call an image a photograph, I must have seen it originally with my eyes, it must be written with light. The light is the light of the universe, of being, a power far greater than any data stored in the dark recesses of any blinking machine, anywhere on Earth.

If we lose interest in photography and retreat into prettified fantasy, we lose our memory.

Photography’s value is its relationship to memory, and much of photography is about the memory of an individual. Individualism is a precious and dangerous thing, in these times.

Sontag’s On Photography was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1977. Her Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947–1963 was edited by David Rieff and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under the Picador imprint in 2008.