In Plato’s Cave allegory, prisoner’s confined in a cave, observe life-like shadows of objects cast on the wall due to a fire present at their backs; due to this trickery, the prisoners are actually seeing false images of reality, hence the title of Susan Sontag’s essay, “In Plato’s Cave”. To Sontag, photos are just that; falsified images of reality with no deeper meaning avouched. Overall, I am in agreement with Sontag when she says, “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's Cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth” (Sontag 779). Sontag presents an effectively persuasive essay that enforces her central claim that a photograph is only a mere representation of the truth.
Sontag adduces photographs as artifacts of…show more content… The allegory’s overall meaning is that the prisoners are only able to see an image of something that they believe is reality when in fact, it is only a shadow; the prisoners are completely blind to the real objects present directly behind them. It seems as though Sontag is comparing the allegory of these shadows to reality and photography; photos are like the shadows in Plato’s Cave, they simply are not real. Also, photographs can easily be doctored or changed; “Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear” (Sontag 780). This example reveals just how deceptive a photograph can appear; a flaw in Sontag’s claim, however, is that a memory of an event may be just as flawed as a tampered photo. Just like a camera, or the person behind the lens, the brain is not perfect in the way that is captures things and stores them away
