4.1: Advancing Toward Photography

Susan Sontag, in her seminal essay “In Plato’s Cave” from On Photography, articulates that the human urge to make pictures stems from a deep desire to augment memory and to capture time itself. This drive to preserve and fix moments visually is foundational to photography’s conceptual base. She connects the act of photographing to a long-standing tradition of attempting to hold on to fleeting experiences and render them permanent, stating:

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”[i]

She argues that taking a picture is not just about recording but about possessing—turning the ephemeral into something we can keep, revisit, and use to confirm our reality.

Continuing from Susan Sontag’s view that photography fulfills a human urge to augment memory and “capture time,” we can trace this impulse far back before the invention of the camera—indeed, to the very roots of image-making itself. The act of marking surfaces with representations is one of the most enduring ways humans have attempted to fix memory, to give permanence to impermanent experiences.'

This impulse is most vividly seen in prehistoric cave paintings, such as those in Lascaux and Chauvet, where early humans rendered animals, handprints, and symbols on cave walls. These were not idle decorations; they were acts of remembrance and presence. As Jean Clottes, a leading scholar of Paleolithic art, notes, cave painting served both symbolic and ritualistic functions: “Images are memories fixed on the wall, perhaps to preserve or control what was seen, dreamed, or hunted”[ii]. In other words, these early drawings helped people recall, transmit, and even influence events—a concept parallel to Sontag’s idea of the photograph as a memento and a means of control over time and space.

David Lewis-Williams, another prominent scholar in rock art studies, argues that these paintings were created as part of a cognitive and spiritual experience, often involving altered states of consciousness. He writes, “The images were not merely to recall but to invoke—the past, the spirit world, and the mysteries of life and death”[iii] Drawing, then, was more than a mnemonic device—it was a technology of memory, emotion, and transformation.

Through the millennia, the practice of drawing to memorialize persisted. In ancient Egypt, tomb paintings and carvings preserved the deeds of pharaohs and the promises of the afterlife. In classical Greece and Rome, portrait busts and reliefs served to commemorate the dead, much as photographs do today. In the Middle Ages, illuminated manuscripts depicted saints and stories to preserve cultural memory. Across cultures and time periods, the hand-drawn image has served as both a record and a ritual, bridging the realms of memory, imagination, and identity.

Thus, Sontag’s observation about photography as a modern means to “seize the fleeting” is part of a continuum: from pigment on stone walls to silver on glass plates, humans have always sought to leave marks that outlast the moment.

The human desire to preserve memory through images—what Susan Sontag identified as a longing to "capture time"—did not remain bound to the gesture of drawing alone. As civilizations advanced, so did their tools and theories for capturing likeness and preserving visual memory. This evolution moved from the tactile and symbolic—seen in cave paintings and Egyptian tomb murals—toward intellectual and optical discovery.

Prehistoric and ancient societies harnessed images for memory and ritual. The cave paintings of Lascaux (ca. 17,000 BCE) depict animals with dynamic movement and layered compositions, likely meant to record significant events or invoke spiritual success in the hunt. Likewise, ancient Egyptian tomb paintings served to ensure the continuity of memory and identity in the afterlife. These visual records often included precise depictions of possessions, daily routines, and cosmological symbols that guided the dead through the afterlife. As Egyptologist Gay Robins explains, “To depict something in art was to give it permanence”[iv].

Yet even as artistic methods evolved, the underlying question remained: how could human beings accurately record the visible world? This search for optical fidelity—the truthful rendering of a scene—moved from image-making as ritual toward science.

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