“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
Excellent composition. Past the ironic humour is a deeper question of Mass Media in general and specifically photography.
Mass Media consumes Mass Media, turning it into content and modifying context. Photographing the act of photographing turns the process and the photographer, and their subject into content.
We viewers are now an extension of the process. Interacting with the photograph & you . The image and the interaction/conversation becomes part of the blog post, which is another piece of Mass Media.
Furthermore we are left wondering, who was photographing you as you took this shot ?