Triangulation

In Susan Sontag's book 'On Photography', she explores a wide range of topics and issues within Photography as a medium. One of the main problems which she talks about are ethics within photography, of both the photographer themselves and their subjects.

She explains how photography has changed and evolved over the years, and how it has now become a way of life. It’s used more commonly for personal reasons, such as birthdays, weddings etc. It’s not just the rich and wealthy who are able to use photography anymore, due to the rapid changes in technology meaning photography is now widely available to more people.

Not only this, but Sontag raises alarms about problems in society and on a political basis. For example, the photograph of the Vietnamese children running down the street covered in napalm. She shows how photography can also be used to change people’s views on political problems.

In another section of her book she shows how ‘beauty’ is a focus for photography, and explains how photography and the camera can be used as a way to make the world appear beautiful. The advances in technology mean that in today’s society you can edit a photograph to make it appear to be something it is not.

And finally, she considers how photography can be used as a weapon, and how it is still considered offensive to take a photograph of someone, meaning we have not yet fully accepted photography as an everyday life occurrence.