On Photography

“Melancholy Objects” explores Sontag’s final assertion in the previous essay that American photography is highly melancholic. She explores this melancholy through photography’s connections to surrealism and how the passage of time affects photographs. Sontag believes that time makes any photograph surreal, or hyper-real in a way that feels disconnected from the present. The passage of time allows people to hold and see the past in the form of photographs, immortalizing a person’s youth or suffering. Sontag compares the photograph consumer to the middle-class flâneur, who likewise tours places and experiences that aren’t their own in the world’s “dark seamy corners” (43). Time’s unique effect makes the flâneur-like experience of photography surreal by preserving past examples of wealth and poverty for current-day consumption as entertainment.

Sontag notes that two general types of photographers exist in relationship to melancholy; the scientist and the moralist. Scientists, like German photographer August Sander, want to catalogue, record, and document every facet of a particular aspect of reality through the camera. Sontag calls this a “pseudo-scientific neutrality,” since the photographers’ bias is always visible through how they choose to pose and capture their subjects.