Memento Mori

I just started reading a fascinating book purchased from my beloved Kramer's Bookstore. On Photography is Susan Sontag's perspective of photography's purpose and its effect on society. First published in 1973, Sontag's analysis draws on the works of a range of photographers from Stieglitz to Arbus, Warhol to Muybridge. I'd like to share a more thorough write up with I'm done but even the introductory chapter is full of thought-provoking conclusions that I have to share. As one reviewer put it, "Not many photographs are worth a thousand of (Susan Sontag's) words." I'm not sure whether I'm in agreement with all of her words yet, but here are a few that I had to underline regardless:

"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe"

"...photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power"

"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."

"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a "good" picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing - including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune."

"That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph."

Do you agree with any of Sontag's conclusions? What do you think the purpose of photography is?