FIORELLA VALDESOLO
One of my majors in college was visual art, with a focus on photography. I remember reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography, a 1977 collection of her essays that were first published in the New York Review of Books, at a point when I was really questioning the direction of my work. Her analysis of the medium, even twenty years after her words were first published, felt so new and nuanced—she wrote of how the camera is weaponized, how photography can be a device for giving the appearance of participation, how taking a photo means participating in another’s mortality and vulnerability. Her brilliant perspective made my head spin with new questions and reignited my passion for the path I’d chosen. Though I never became a photographer (as my college self had intended), images still govern much of my professional and personal life so I think often of Sontag’s words, particularly now as so much of our days are collectively spent screen-facing. And I wonder, if Sontag were still alive, how many more essays our current image over-production and -consumption would spawn.
