Sublime

” Levitt’s deadpan spunkiness emerges throughout the essay. She is a proud reporter, insisting on the exterior, matter-of-fact, impersonal quality of her work, writes Gopnik. But she refused to become a journalist. “A reporter,” according to Levitt, “says what she sees; a photojournalist sees what everyone else is saying.”

It is as if photographers, responding to an increasingly depleted sense of reality, were looking for a transfusion—traveling to new experiences, refreshing the old ones. Their ubiquitous activities amount to the most radical, and the safest, version of mobility. The urge to have new experiences is translated into the urge to take photographs:

while trying to help groups and activists report abusive content on Facebook, my team starts noticing that users appear to be using unofficial Facebook apps that don’t offer a reporting function.

they identify the archive as a site of struggle and contestation not only over control of history and social memory but also over subjectivity and community formation.

The program's voyeurism lies in the way it jumps between scopophilia on the one hand, and the public's erotic rage on the other. Its affective charge emerges in the movement between these positions.