Against the Infinite Scroll: After Sontag
Notes on attention, images, and the lost art of looking
We live with a lens where our eyes should be. A scene presents itself—a child’s laugh, the glint of late light on a hull, strangers in a fleeting geometry at a crosswalk—and the reflex is immediate: lift, frame, tap. The gesture is practiced, frictionless, almost involuntary. We say we are keeping a memory, but most of what we keep we will never truly see again. It will fall into the soft, unsettled noise of our feeds, sink undecanted into a hard drive, or drift weightless in the cloud. The moment is gone, and in its place an image is filed—one more small coin tossed into an ocean of small coins.
Susan Sontag warned us about this half a century ago. In On Photography, she wrote that “To collect photographs is to collect the world.” We have turned that collecting into an economy: impressions as currency, attention as contract, the camera as an instrument of acquisition. To photograph, Sontag argued, is to appropriate. Today, in the age of infinite scroll, appropriation no longer shocks us because it is ambient. We do not steal; we skim. We no longer observe so much as harvest. We make a kind of visual mulch.
The consequence is a quiet but profound estrangement from awe. Awe requires duration and exposure to otherness; it asks that we be altered by what we meet. But the current ecology of images is engineered for the minute and the manageable—units of spectacle optimized to be glanced at and moved past. Sontag observed that the camera makes reality “atomic, manageable, and opaque.” The stream has atomized further: not only manageable, but disposable. We take more and feel less. We keep more and remember less.
Democratization has a double edge. That everyone can photograph is a triumph of access and possibility. It has given voice to those long kept out of view and has diversified the world’s self-portrait. But the ease of capture has also made the act itself bland. When everything can be photographed and shared at once and for free, the cost of taking an image seems to approach zero. The cost to our attention does not. Our attention is finite; our capacity for wonder is not infinite; our memory needs editing as much as our archives do. A tool that was once slow and stubborn—film, chemicals, the ritual of contact sheets—now produces a torrent. And torrents erode.
We have, in subtle ways, broken our relationship with the art of photographing. The art was never about owning an instant; it was about submitting to it. The camera is not merely a recording device but a discipline—a way of entering time with a heightened sympathy for form and light. To "take" a picture is an impoverished verb. To make a photograph is closer to what the medium can be when it’s practiced as attention: an act of regard, a conversation with light, a promise to frame less so that what is within the frame can matter more.
Even when we are there, in the presence of wonder, we hold up the screen and click away.
Sontag’s parable of Plato’s cave remains uncomfortably current. We sit facing the shadows, mistaking representation for presence, then mistake scorn for sophistication when the shadows bore us. The too-muchness of images has, paradoxically, made us immune to them. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag warned that repeated exposure to spectacle—especially suffering—can dull response. The logic extends beyond atrocity into the texture of daily life: saturated by images of sunsets, we begin to distrust sunsets. Saturated by images of intimacy, we train ourselves to perform intimacy for the lens. Even our private joys are rehearsed with a future audience in mind. We live as if accompanied by a camera, and so we live to be accompanied by a camera.
This is not a call to austerity or a wish to rewind technology. It is a plea for proportion, for edits as an ethic, for intervals of silence between images so that any single image can regain the power to speak. Photographs are at their best when they reveal more than they display—when they carry a residue of encounter that can’t be reduced to a caption. But that residue requires that the photographer has encountered something without the alibi of the feed. There must be moments we decline to harvest. There must be things we refuse to turn into content.
What would a practice look like that resists the blandness of ease? Perhaps it begins with a slower grammar: fewer frames, longer walks without the phone, one lens for a season, a commitment to print what we wish to keep so that keeping regains a weight. Perhaps it continues with a discipline of refusal: archives reviewed and thinned, duplicates and near-duplicates deleted without sentimentality, images asked to earn their place. Perhaps, too, it includes a ritual of looking without photographing—an hour a week of deliberate observation, a walk along the water with empty hands, the discipline of watching light change with no intention beyond noticing that it does. These are small gestures, but art is often made of small gestures done again.
Sontag understood that photography changes the ethics of seeing. A culture that is always looking for what can be used will train the eye to convert the world into inventory. A culture that is willing to look without taking might rediscover reverence. Reverence is not anti-modern; it is anti-indifference. It is a way of saying that some things are not improved by frictionlessness, that difficulty can be a tutor, that a picture hard-won has a better chance of holding.
There is a freedom in letting some moments pass unharvested. The sea does not demand that we name each wave; the memory of a morning can be enough without its proof. If we are to make photographs that matter—photographs that resist becoming noise—we might start by restoring the conditions that let awe survive contact with the lens. We could step out of the cave for an hour and let our eyes ache in the daylight. Then, when we return to the shadows, we will know again why any picture is worth making at all.
“Photographs furnish evidence,” Sontag wrote. Let ours furnish evidence not only that we were there, but that we were capable of being moved. Let them certify not merely our presence but our attention. And let what we choose not to photograph certify something, too: that wonder is not a commodity, that life exceeds the frame, and that a camera—like any instrument—gives back only as much as we are willing to bring.
Endnote — sources & exact quotes
“To collect photographs is to collect the world.” — Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). See early paragraphs of the essay.
“Photographs furnish evidence.” — Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” On Photography.
“The camera makes reality ‘atomic, manageable, and opaque.’” — Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” On Photography.
