100 Best Photos of the Year

Though an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing, it is still ideology, (in the broades sense) that determines what constitutes an event. There can be no evidence, photographic or otherwise, of an event unti the event itself has been named and characterized. And it is never photographic evidence which can construct – more properly, identify – events; the contribution of photography always follows the naming of the event. What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographsis the existence of relevant political consciousness. Without politics, photographs of the slaughter bench of history will most likely be experienced as, simply, unreal or as a demoralizing emotional blow.

On Photography Susan Sontag