The work began as something much stricter, and it had a different name: Worshippers. I photographed only people who held their smartphone up above their head to take a picture of an artwork or a building. That gesture gives them the posture of someone at prayer.

The connection to Susan Sontag came later, and I rebuilt the project around it.

I bought her On Photography in 1979, in my first year as a student, and I have read it several times since. Some of her claims were contested even then. They stayed with me anyway.

Years later I came across a study: people who walk through an exhibition with a smartphone remember less of it than people who leave the phone alone. I know that effect from the inside. When I enter a museum intending to photograph the visitors, camera in hand, I barely take in the exhibition at all. And when I leave the camera at home in order to actually look, I am guaranteed to walk into the one scene I would have wanted. This project keeps me in that dilemma permanently.

Here too the pictures came before the quotations. Looking through them I kept finding photographs that stood for something Sontag had written. A woman photographing a wall, next to her line that taking pictures is also a way of refusing experience, of narrowing it down to a search for the photogenic. Two women in Cologne Cathedral holding a camera out in front of them, next to her observation that tourists, as if out of fear, put the camera between themselves and whatever they encounter.

Which leaves the question the project is named after. We now make more photographs in a single day than Sontag could have imagined in a lifetime. Do the things she wrote in 1977 still hold?

After several years of this project I think they do. The numbers have changed beyond anything she could have pictured; what happens between a person and a camera has not. I catch myself at it every time I enter a museum.

Nobody exclaims: ”Isn’t that ugly! I must take a picture of it” Susan Sontag; The Heroism of Vision

So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”
Susan Sontag; The Heroism of Vision

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic.”

Susan Sontag; In Plato’s Cave

“The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular.” Susan Sontag; The Heroism of Vision

Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter.” Susan Sontag; In Plato’s Cave