Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
I originally wrote this in August for another publication. They did not want it, so six months later, it is now on The Shed.
When On Photography was published in 1977, Susan Sontag captured an urgent theme of photography. Throughout the collection of essays, she dissected the photograph as a cultural object and an instrument of possession. Photographs were never neutral, but active agents in shaping how we see the world and ourselves. Moments were turned into trophies, experience into object, and reality into something endlessly reproducible. Sontag saw in the camera a compulsion to collect and claim pieces of life, understanding that photography was as much about framing perception as it was about preserving memory. In contemporary times, her observations feel less like historical critique and more a blueprint for rationalizing the image-saturated present. What Sontag once applied to rolls of film now resonates with the production, circulation, and consumption of social media posts, where the photograph’s role is now rooted in performance.
There has never been an easier time for posting a photo, yet the act is rarely urgent; it exists in a space between intention and impulse. You thumb through rows of nearly identical frames, weighing which version of the moment is truest. More precisely, which one will look truest? The photograph is not about reality, but the negotiation between experience and representation. The picture might be from a birthday dinner, a night out, or a friend’s living room. The remarkability of the scene is null, but the aesthetic of the moment isn’t; the necessity of preservation is there. The photograph becomes an assertion: this happened, and it mattered. What gets shared is never the moment itself, only a fragmented placeholder for the moment, a token of life digitalized. In her reflections on photography, Susan Sontag observes this: “Photographs really are experienced captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.”1 The post becomes an arrangement between what is lived and what is presented; moments are anticipated, framed, and curated before they are shared. Ordinary experiences are transformed into objects of possession or display. By photographing them, we assert ownership over both memory and perception: the image does not merely record the moment, it defines how the moment will be remembered, circulated, and understood by others. The “acquisitive mood” is amplified by the landscape of social media, where images are scrolled, liked, and compared. The camera, once a private extension of consciousness, has transformed into an instrument of assertion, projecting the self into a network of attention. The photograph is both a record of life and a performance of control over how that life is perceived. Sontag’s insight forms the foundation that social media does not merely capture experience; it reshapes it, transforming fleeting moments into tailored pieces that carry the power of presence and the burden of display.
The post doesn’t display a life lived; it alters it. The post is simultaneously a record and a manipulation: it promises an objective truth formed by choices of angle, light, timing, and composition. In a restaurant, a couple of dudes might be getting some beers, and in a moment of earnestness, they decide to take a picture. Of course, the picture taker will flip the camera around and take a photo. What most typically follows is a chorus of: “My hair looks weird”, “Let me fix my shirt”, and other suggestions meant to manipulate the moment. Online, they may appear carefree, dare I say, letting loose a little bit. But the objective facts of the true process will be lost, irrelevant to the record. The version that matters will be the one preserved, edited, and sent out into the cloud. Later that night, someone will inevitably scroll past the image. Some will like, others will scroll on, and the photo will dissolve into the blur of others like it. The sheer number of photographs seen daily is unremarkable. Everyone carries a camera and a gallery. As photographs have become more common, so too have photographers, eroding the sense of weight or significance the photograph once held. Yet the urge to create images has only grown. The photograph continues to assert its presence.
There is a comfort in this presence. Social media arranges life in a succinct way; every post is proof that something happened and is worth remembering. Even trivial posts, such as a beer or a picture of your friend walking, are evidence of appetite, routine, and agency. In this way, social media absorbs the initial logic of photography as a way of collecting the world. The photo becomes an emblem, an object of both value and identity, becoming a reflection of the person as they would like to see themselves. Sontag observed this, explaining the photographs function as a trophy, a moment not only captured but owned, acting as a personal archive broadcast to the public. Yet, as the collection grows, it becomes more untethered from the life it is meant to represent. On social media, the post does not age; images remain equally vivid, unmarked by the years since they were taken. A post could be sharper than the memory of the day itself. A music festival in July and a birthday in January live together in the non-linear feed of social media, a constant present where nothing decays.
If the photograph once served as a way to stop time, the post makes time continuous. Nothing is erased unless done so deliberately. The past and present scroll together simultaneously. The post is planting an image of permanency. Memory becomes inseparable from the archive; the experiencing of living now exists in dialogue with its mediated representation. While the post provides evidence of life, it also transforms that evidence into something that can be framed for others. The permanency of the post collapses our private experience into a public forum; every moment acts as both a genuine experience and its representation. Life becomes about what is experienced and then what is displayed from that.
It is possible to imagine a world without this constant image-making. Without cameras, moments will pass unrecorded. To remember relies on the mind’s constant shifting and unreliable understanding. But to live in a world where every gesture can be photographed frames experiences as potential posts. A friend’s laugh, a joke, a dance all now seem preemptively composed, the camera already imagined as taking a picture. The act of living begins to imitate the act of recording. The way we talk, gesture, or pause is made in regard to how it might appear online. This habit of posting changes the texture of living. Even without malice or calculation, a layer of performance overlays the day. Even as I write this at my boarding gate, I am already planning and curating how I want my post to look when I get back from my trip. Though I don’t have any semblance of what pictures will be present, I am hyper-aware that there will be a post. The post will, of course, become my form of memory. Every picture I don’t deem as good will get deleted, and the ones that remain will be how I and the rest of my followers remember my trip. My memory of writing this, a few too many airport beers in, will be replaced by a harped-on collection of pictures showing my time in London. Proof that I went there and enjoyed it.
This proof matters more than you might admit. In private, most can remember obsessively checking the number of likes you have received, reaffirming the memories’ worth. To call it vain and shallow is easy; however, the truth is even easier: humans want to be seen, and the photograph and post provide convenient avenues to show oneself. Yet the act of both seeing and being seen carries an implicit power dynamic: “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”2 On social media, this dynamic is magnified. Likes, comments, and messages enact a form of acknowledgment that both affirms and frames the self. Posting still acts as an assertion of existence, but also an invitation for others to participate in possessing one’s image, to recognize and codify the curated self. The post becomes proof, performance, and possession. There is a cost to this visibility. Posts will ultimately flatten what they capture. Mood, contradiction, and voice will all be reduced to the visible surface. Over time, this flattening not only becomes normal but the truth. You begin to think of yourself in terms of how you appear. Smiles become practiced, gestures deliberate.
There is, of course, another reason for this. Apps like Instagram are not neutral stages for friendship; they are meticulously designed instruments of profit. While represented as spaces to connect, these platforms are structured to maximize engagement, attention, and ultimately revenue. Every post, like, or comment acts as bait to draw the user into a cycle of both consumption and validation. This ‘friend network’ is less of a social environment and more of a system calibrated to keep you scrolling, comparing, and posting. The architecture of the apps transforms sharing into auditions for attention, and by extension, monetization. Likes and comments act as both gestures of acknowledgement and feedback loops in the economy of engagement. Posting both has social and economic value. Your ‘proof of life’ is simultaneously a product and a performance. What is rewarded is legible, appealing, and digestible; what is ambiguous or complex is deprioritized. ‘Authentic’ moments become subject to coercion: the knowledge that the post exists within a system optimized for shapes of engagement. The post is to the whim of economic and social forces of what can be seen, remembered, and valued about you.
This does not negate that there is pleasure to both the post and viewing of other posts. Scrolling through images of friends and strangers is a strong reminder that life is happening everywhere at once. Posting collapses distance; a friend might be on a trip to Chicago while another is attending college in Charleston, but on social media, they (their posts) are right next to each other. It makes the world and its possibilities feel abundant. This abundance can feel competitive; however, each image acts as a subtle performance of doing more, reflecting as being more. This distinguishes the social media photograph from its context. The post, unlike photographs, is not hung on a wall or placed in an album; it exists in a network of comments, metrics, and algorithms. Its meaning is shaped by what comes before and after it, how it circulates, and how it is received. The post is an object in an economy of attention.
The act of posting is then never purely personal. It is a transaction with a system that decides who sees the image and how often. A post of a golden retriever wagging its tail may appear above a news story about mass starvation. The juxtaposition is jarring, but this is the feed’s purpose; everything is equally present. The post’s claim to truth now becomes tenuous; everyone edits, filters, and stages posts in hopes of making their ‘audience’ enjoy it. When the fundamental aspect of the post is enjoyment, what realities do we subvert to serve this basis? If the marketplace is dominated by positive attention, what worth is posting reality if it’s not enjoyable? Even honesty then becomes an aesthetic choice.
There is no true outside to this system either. Even those who avoid posting are still aware of the logic of the feed; they see friends’ images, feel the pull of comparison, and knowingly or not understand the dichotomy of showing and being shown. The post has become social currency, a mode of existence. Refusal risks invisibility. And yet invisibility has its appeal. Leaving a moment unphotographed is letting it remain wholly one’s own. Memory exists in its purest form, unframed. Still, the camera is always available. The allure of shaping lives into posts is omnipresent.
In the time Sontag remarked upon, the photograph was already a contested object. But in the networked age, the photograph and the post’s role have expanded and blurred. The post is not just an image; it is an entry into the public eye of being, a proof of life offered up for inspection and, increasingly, a commodity within a system designed to monetize attention. The desire to be seen is not new, but the conditions for being seen have never been so immediate, continuous, or contingent on a platform’s architecture, which rewards visibility and legibility above all else. To participate is to curate, to give yourself to the negotiation between living, showing that you are living, and feeding the machinery that measures, amplifies, and monetizes that visibility. Each post is both performance and product: an assertion of existence, a digital self, and a contributor to the platforms’ profit calculus. The modern photograph is less about freezing time and more about keeping pace with it, ensuring that you are present in a system where memories, attention, and economic value live forever.
