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Untitled photograph by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved

“In the modern way of seeing, reality is first of all appearance - which is always changing. A photograph records appearance. The record of photography is the record of change, of the destruction of the past. Being modern (and if we have the habit of looking at photographs, we are by definition modern), we understand all identities to be constructions. The only irrefutable reality - and our best clue to identity - is how people appear.”

“Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.

It is the ineluctably ‘modern’ way of seeing - prejudiced in favor of projects of discovery and innovation.

This way of seeing which now has a long history, shapes what we look for and used to noticing in photographs.”

“The modern way of seeing is to see in fragments. It is felt that reality is essentially unlimited, and knowledge is open-ended. It follows that all boundaries, all unifying ideas have to be misleading, demagogic; at best, provisional; almost always in the long run, untrue. To see reality in the light of certain unifying ideas has the undeniable advantage of giving shape and form to our experience. But it also - so the modern way of seeing instructs us - denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real. Thereby it represses our energy, indeed our right, to remake what we wish to remake - our society, our selves. What is liberating, we are told, is to notice more and more.”

[Excerpts from Susan Sontag's essay 'Photography: A Little Summa' found in her recently published book At the Same Time (2007), New York, Farrar Straus Giroux]

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