A Postmodern Defense of Street Photography Against Susan Sontag’s Moralism

In Garry Winogrand’s Central Park Zoo, New York (1967), a Black man and a White woman walk toward the camera, each cradling a young chimpanzee dressed like a child. The visual rhyme is immediate. So is the discomfort. The photograph can be read as a joke about family, a scene of urban strangeness or an image entangled with the long racist history of comparing Black people to apes. None of those readings can be neutralized by discovering what Winogrand meant.

That uncertainty is often presented as street photography’s defense. The photographer does not control the picture’s final meaning, so the viewer must complete it. But the same uncertainty can become an alibi. Winogrand still chose the instant, organized the frame and released the image into a culture whose visual histories exceeded him. Meaning may be unstable, but the act of making and circulating a photograph remains material.

Susan Sontag understood that material force. Her writing on photography is severe because she refuses the fantasy that a camera merely observes. A photograph selects, acquires and transforms its subject into something portable. It can preserve a person, expose them, aestheticize them or detach their appearance from the circumstances of their life.

Sontag did not have the last word on those relations. No critic does. But a defense of street photography becomes stronger when it keeps her warning instead of caricaturing it. Street photography is neither inherently exploitative nor ethically innocent. Its meanings are made among photographers, photographed people, editors, platforms and viewers, while power remains unevenly distributed among them. Responsibility does not disappear when certainty does. It returns at every stage of the image’s life.

---

I. What Sontag Got Right

When I first encountered Sontag as a graduate student, I treated On Photography almost as a verdict. Her claims seemed to place every public photograph under suspicion before any particular image or encounter could be examined. Years of photographing people in public made that totalizing rhetoric feel less adequate. Street encounters are too various to be resolved by a single account of the camera as predatory.

The temptation is therefore to reverse her verdict and declare the medium open, democratic and ethically redeemed by ambiguity. That reversal is no better. Sontag’s lasting insight is that photography changes a relation. The camera is never a transparent window. It gives one participant the ability to frame an encounter, retain it and show it elsewhere. The photographed person may look back, pose, refuse, ignore the camera or never notice it. None of those responses gives the two participants identical control over what happens next.

Her later writing also complicates the rigid position often attributed to her. In “Looking at War,” the essay that became part of Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag argues that photographs of suffering can prompt opposing political responses. A picture can support a demand for peace, a call for revenge or a generalized sense that terrible things happen. Captions can redirect the use of a death. What is shown must also be judged against what has been withheld.

This is already an account of situated spectatorship. Sontag’s refusal of an automatic shared “we” among viewers anticipates the point that seeing is conditioned by history, identity and political position. The weakness of her earlier criticism is not that it knows nothing about unstable meaning. It is that its sweeping rhetoric sometimes makes the medium itself appear guilty before practice, context and consequence can be distinguished.

The correction is not to abandon Sontag. It is to move from a verdict on photography to judgments about photographs and the relations they create.

---

II. Meaning Exceeds Intention

Roland Barthes is useful here, but only if his argument is kept within its limits. “The Death of the Author” challenges the belief that a work’s creator can dictate its final interpretation. Once a text enters the world, readers bring other histories, codes and associations to it. An author’s intention is no longer a master key.

The same is true of photographs. Winogrand’s intention cannot close Central Park Zoo around a single meaning. Contemporary viewers encounter the image through histories of race, family, spectacle, animal display and the street-photography canon. Those contexts are not later distortions laid over a pure photograph. They are part of what the photograph can now do.

The current essay makes a crucial mistake at this point. It treats the loss of authorial control as a transfer of ethical responsibility from photographer to viewer. Barthes does not justify that move. A photographer can fail to control meaning and still remain responsible for choosing the frame, the moment, the caption and the conditions of publication. The viewer’s agency is additional. It is not a replacement.

Nor does interpretive openness mean every reading is equally persuasive. A photograph contains visible evidence. It comes from a particular encounter. It enters identifiable institutions and histories. Interpretation remains answerable to those conditions even when no final account can exhaust them.

This distinction matters because intention is frequently used in opposite ways. A photographer may defend an injurious picture by saying no harm was intended. A critic may condemn an ambiguous picture by assigning the photographer a motive the evidence cannot support. Both approaches make intention sovereign. A more rigorous ethics asks what the photograph does, to whom, under what conditions and with what foreseeable consequences.

Meaning exceeds the photographer. Responsibility does not.

---

III. Agency Inside an Unequal Encounter

Street photography is not one social relation. Compare Jamel Shabazz’s portraits of young New Yorkers with Bruce Gilden’s close, flash-lit photographs. Both practices are made in public, but they organize participation very differently.

The Whitney has described Shabazz’s work as part of a collaborative turn in which photographers actively staged images with their subjects. His pictures preserve clothes, gestures and group identities that the people in front of his camera helped shape. In a Brooklyn Museum interview, Shabazz recalls speaking to the people he photographed and building images from brief but meaningful connections. The pose is not evidence that power has vanished. It is evidence that the photographed person is participating in how they will appear.

Gilden’s method produces another kind of encounter. His signature New York photographs are made at close range, often with flash. The result can be intimate, comic, aggressive or humiliating, sometimes within the same frame. A recoil, grimace or raised hand records resistance, but it does not prove that the encounter has become equal. The subject’s capacity to react should not be used to excuse the photographer’s power to initiate, select and circulate the exchange.

This difference is more useful than the binary between voyeurism and collaboration. Participation occurs by degrees and under conditions. A subject can possess agency while remaining vulnerable. A photographer can work collaboratively while retaining final editorial control. An unannounced photograph can be intrusive and still become historically important. A consensual portrait can later circulate in contexts nobody anticipated.

The ethical question is therefore not whether the subject is active or passive in some absolute sense. It is what forms of agency were available in the encounter, what power remained unequal and how the resulting image was used.

Power may circulate through a glance, a pose, a refusal and a camera, but it does not circulate evenly. Resistance changes a relation without necessarily balancing it.

---

IV. The Photograph Is a Relation

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay offers the strongest framework for moving beyond both Sontag’s suspicion and postmodern innocence. In The Civil Contract of Photography, she treats photography as a set of relations among the photographer, the photographed person, the spectator and the powers that govern who can appear and whose claims will be recognized.

The civil contract is not a release form, and it should not be confused with consent. It names obligations that exceed the photographer’s ownership of the image. The photographed person is not exhausted by their appearance in a frame. The spectator is not merely a consumer. The photograph can carry a claim from one person to another even when institutions attempt to control its meaning.

This relational account changes where ethics is located. Responsibility does not occur once, at the instant of exposure. It recurs.

• At capture, the photographer decides how to approach, how close to move, what vulnerability to record and whether the situation permits meaningful participation.
• At selection, one expression or gesture is made to stand for a longer encounter. Other frames disappear.
• At publication, titles, captions, sequencing and surrounding text shape what the viewer is invited to believe.
• At circulation, editors, archives, search engines and social platforms detach images from their first context and deliver them to new audiences.
• At viewing, spectators can repeat a stereotype, consume a person as spectacle or attend to the historical and political claim the photograph carries.

These responsibilities are distributed, but they are not interchangeable. A platform’s algorithm does not erase the photographer’s decision. A viewer’s cruel reading does not mean the photographer authored that cruelty. A subject’s participation does not authorize every later use. Each participant acquires a different power and a different obligation.

Digital circulation makes this recurrence impossible to ignore. A street photograph can leave the photographer’s website, lose its caption, become a meme, enter a facial-recognition dataset or be recirculated years later during an event the subject never anticipated. The ethics of the image cannot be decided solely by what happened on the pavement.

---

V. Looking Is Not the Same as Consuming

Criticism of photography can become so preoccupied with the dangers of looking that refusal begins to appear morally pure. Susie Linfield challenges that retreat in The Cruel Radiance. Writing about photographs of political violence, she argues that looking can be an ethically and historically necessary act. Images can connect viewers to events they did not witness and to people whose lives power would prefer to keep invisible.

That defense cannot be transferred wholesale from war photography to the street. The stakes and institutions differ. Its value is narrower and more important. The possibility of voyeurism does not make attention itself corrupt. Refusing to make or view photographs can also erase, sentimentalize or abandon the visible life of others.

As a street photographer, I work close, usually with a wide lens, and I often acknowledge or speak with the people I photograph. That proximity does not certify the work as ethical. It does make the encounter harder to imagine as neutral. Sometimes a person returns the look or performs for the camera. Sometimes there is no exchange. The responsibilities change with the situation, but they do not disappear.

I do not want an ethics that decides in advance that every candid photograph is theft. I also do not want the photographer’s romance with spontaneity to outrank another person’s vulnerability. A photograph can be legal and still be cruel. It can be made without explicit consent and still become historically valuable. It can be collaborative and still circulate in ways that betray the relationship from which it came.

The task is judgment rather than purity. That means describing what is visible without claiming total knowledge of a person, supplying context without pretending context can control every reading, and remaining open to the possibility that publication should be revised, delayed or refused. It also means recognizing that the people who appear in public are not raw material simply because the law permits a camera to see them.

Linfield restores a reason to look. Sontag preserves the suspicion that looking can become possession. Street photography needs both insights.

---

VI. Responsibility Without Certainty

A poststructuralist ethics of street photography cannot offer a rule that makes every encounter safe. That is not its failure. The failure would be to turn uncertainty into innocence.

The photographer does not own meaning, but does control consequential decisions. The photographed person is not a passive object, but may have less control over selection and circulation. The editor and platform did not make the original encounter, but can radically alter its audience and use. The viewer did not press the shutter, but participates in the meanings and pleasures that gather around the image.

This is more demanding than Sontag’s harshest generalizations and more demanding than the celebratory claim that the street is a democratic theater. It requires judgment at each stage without the comfort of a final formula. It asks the photographer to distinguish legality from care, visibility from availability and ambiguity from evasion.

It also leaves room for the medium’s value. Street photographs preserve gestures, relationships and public worlds that would otherwise disappear. They can challenge official accounts of a city. They can show how people fashion themselves, encounter strangers and occupy shared space. Their fragmentary character is not automatically truthful, but it can resist the false completeness of institutional narratives.

Winogrand’s Central Park Zoo remains uncomfortable because its meanings cannot be sealed. That uncertainty is not the photograph’s innocence. Nor is our discomfort proof that the image should not exist. The picture has outlived its encounter and now asks each viewer to judge the histories it activates, the relation it records and the uses to which it has been put.

Street photography is worth defending because public life is shared, conflictual and visible. But shared space is not ownerless space, and visibility does not cancel vulnerability. The photograph does not end the encounter. It extends it, carrying responsibility with it.