the new age of unbelief strengthened the allegiance to images. The credence that could no longer be given to realities understood in the form of images was now being given to realities understood to be images, illusions. In the preface to the second edition (1843) of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach observes about “our era” that it “prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being”

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977