The Morals of Vision: Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ Revisited (Part 1)

I really enjoyed developing https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Modern_Photography/The_camera

I'm certainly not eager to discount the idea of a broad institutional critique. But I am eager to discount a broad institutional critique where the methodology requires little to no hard data or even secondary sources of research which themselves may be scrutinized to weigh the conclusions the author puts forward.

Also, this:

> “Naïve or commercial or merely utilitarian photography,” she says, “is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken by anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as representative of photography’s characteristic powers as a Stieglitz or an Evans” (OP, pg. 132.)

What does "no different in kind" mean here? I can't think of a definition that either makes the entire statement facile or else is so obscurantist as to be invisible.

Anyhow, it's not enough that an unknown naïve amateur can take a photograph that is as powerful visually as an expert. That could mean the "masters" have no clothes on, but it could equally mean that photography as a medium and technology has a democratizing effect. Or even a little of both. But I hope the modern human would have already known that before reading the passage.