Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. — Susan Sontag

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Author: Susan Sontag

Insight: We've all felt it: the moment when experiencing something beautiful gets crowded out by the urgency to capture it. You're at sunset, a concert, a new city—and instead of just being there, you're composing the frame, checking the light, wondering if this angle will hit on Instagram. The moment becomes a raw ingredient for content, rather than something to live through. Sontag was pointing at something that's only gotten more intense since she wrote this. Travel used to be about changed perspective, about sitting with discomfort, about returning home slightly different. Now it's easy to accumulate thousands of images while barely accumulating any actual memories or understanding. We can visit somewhere and leave with a camera roll full of proof but very little lived experience. The irony is sharp: we document places to remember them, but the act of documenting can mean we never quite arrived in the first place. The non-obvious part? It's not really about photos or cameras. It's about what happens when we outsource our experience to a device. A photo is just a symptom. The real question is whether we're traveling to discover the world or to discover ourselves through the world—or just to collect evidence that we exist. That distinction matters more now than ever.

Source: On Photography, p. 3, 1977