Susan Sontag’s essays on difficult European writers, avant-garde film, politics, photography, and the language of illness embodied the probing intellectual spirit of the 1960s. Photographs depict realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. Further citations as ‘RS’ in the text. It connects you with others. [iv] It is amusing to find in one of her later notebooks a list of likes and dislikes where being photographed and taking photographs both fall firmly into the latter category. Despite her telling Jonathan Cott in 1978 that photography was an “old and very passionate interest” (RS, pg. Susan Sontag’s “ On photography” is a philosophical reasoning about the “still images” that change our world. Unfortunately, Sontag's argument consists of little more than a haphazard assortment of comparisons between various twentieth century artists, repeated arguments, and a lot … On Photography is a collection of essays by American writer, academic, and activist Susan Sontag. 179) she regards the reasons why this might be so as largely extrinsic to photography itself. Susan Sontag – Quotes from ‘On Photography’ | Yatesweb But there is no arguing the fact that it is ubiquitous, and that this in itself is a significant phenomenon. 52) there is precious little evidence of that enthusiasm in the text. The practice of photography gives us assurance by its accurate relation to … Her conversations with her partner, and seminal author Susan Sontag, tell a beautiful story of a partners influence on an artists practice. The Morals of Vision: Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ Revisited (Part 2) June 20, 2017 Bruce Davidson, Susan Sontag, 1971. This reading has a particular relevance to those images of violence that in her view cannot explain its causes or its consequences and so are reduced to a voyeuristic place-holder for genuine engagement. ), Penguin, 2013, pgs. Sontag graciously suggested that someday Campany could write his own book on the subject, titled On Photographs. I began reading Susan Sontag’s book to think more deeply about documentary work. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. By now the pattern that the essays establish should be obvious. On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. This is a pattern throughout the book; examples from the wider practice of photography are usually generalised, while her comparisons to other art-forms are often extensive and quite detailed. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. The authoritative tone she adopts throughout, a characteristic of her style, has suggested that On Photography was, for its author as well as for its audience, a kind of last word on the subject, that no more could be – or need be – said. Anyone interested in the social roles of photography will find this book fascinating and thought-provoking. Once again, it is the inability to discriminate between the different uses of photography and the different contexts in which it might function that undermines the strength of her argument. It made no sense that a writer publishing in the so-called little magazines, like Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, on topics like structuralist philosophy or the history of interpretation, could cross over to become a major literary star. The key point here is the way in which these hopes would sour, and in time be reduced to an aesthetics of marginalisation, making a spectacle of what they would have ostensibly redeemed. 4 Susan at the house on Hedges Lane, Wainscott, Long Island 1988 Frame: 58.6 x 71.4 x 3.2 cm by Annie Leibovitz. Susan Sontag, In Plato’s Cave from the book: On Photography. 52-53. Susan Sontag on how photography shapes our understanding of warfare—for better and for worse. In the best-known photo, cannonballs are strewn across the road; in the other photo, the cannonballs are accumulated in a ditch on the left side of the road. This is how she describes her interest in tackling the medium: “I got interested in writing about photography because I saw that it was this central activity that reflected all the complexities and contradictions and equivocations of this society […] that this activity, by which I mean both the taking of and the looking at pictures encapsulates all these contradictions […] On Photography is a case study for what it means to be living in the twentieth century in an advanced industrial consumer society.” [ii] If nothing else this seems to confirm the idea that photography, as such, was a secondary issue for Sontag, a suspicion that photographers in particular might be seen to harbour. ( Log Out /  Sontag closes by saying that “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” (OP, pg. “Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Tourism is a kind of displaced (visual) colonialism; images of suffering don’t always help to alleviate it – and so on. 87) More than this, photographers, especially those with advanced ambitions, were intent on creating new ways of seeing the world – seeing photographically – to further supplant established points of view, emphasising what the camera made possible for the first time, a kind of intensified seeing that spilt the world into fragments. The discussion of these issues in the book is, admittedly, more dense, and more nuanced, that I have been able to communicate here. to explore the meaning of this essay, with emphasis on the function and implication of such images in mass culture. [iv] It is perhaps revealing that the personal trajectory Sontag assigns to Arbus, in flight from her well-to-do, liberal, Jewish upbringing, was in large measure Sontag’s own as well, though in her case from a rather more modest background, along with a stifling marriage and what she saw as the dull conformity of an academic career. That this traffic should be so effective is because of photography’s status as evidence, but, as she notes, photographers also make choices about how something should look – when photographed – that conforms to the ideas they already have about it, so photography is, in that respect, an ideological enterprise, colonising the visible. In this way, so Sontag argues, Arbus undermines any possible moral or compassionate response to her subjects, creating the equivalence that Sontag views as being entirely characteristic both of photography and an industrialised consumer society, leaving only “paper ghosts and a sharp-eyed witty program of despair” (OP, pg. Required fields are marked *. Also, Sontag’s own Regarding the Pain of Others, Penguin, 2003, especially chapter 7, where she briefly reconsiders some ideas from On Photography. In the best-known photo, cannonballs are strewn across the road; in the other photo, the cannonballs are accumulated in a ditch on the left side of the road. (Editor’s Note: Susan Sontag was, in my opinion, a seminal intellectual, and she authored On Photography, a photographer’s theory manifesto of sorts. The documentary explores Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as … This attitude is no less apparent when in the next essay she turns to the way America has been represented by photographers who held out specific claims for their medium and its capacity to make the world around them comprehensible in new ways. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. In 2012, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris investigated the claims that Fenton had staged the photo. Indeed, Sontag also appears to have pre-empted many critics of ‘social media’ with the observation that the practice of photography “offers […] both participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others – allowing us to participate, while confirming alienation.” (OP, pg. The essay is an extended critique of this situation and its consequences, which Sontag sees a product of a particular socio-historical context, with photography as a way of ‘collecting’ and therefore shaping reality. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. This longevity might seem unlikely, but in fact, some of the reasons for the book’s popularity aren’t hard to grasp. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the first she is concerned with how photography, by providing a new standard of pictorial realism, one founded on a uniquely direct relation between the photograph and its subject, also progressively modified our sense of what actually is real, or rather of what ‘reality’ looks like, so that it seems, at times, to have overtaken ‘the real’ entirely, becoming, as Sontag says, “the norm for the way things appear to us.” (OP, pg. Instead, her intent is to illustrate the way different socio-historical contexts make use of photography to delineate and circumscribe the ‘real,’ reflecting the values of that time and place. This generality is also perhaps its most fatal defect. 11). It also ranges widely – if, at times, very selectively – across the history and practice of photography. […] Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention.” (OP, pg. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. 54 – 55), It is precisely this tendency towards voyeurism, of treating the world as a spectacle to be appreciated (and appropriated) that for Sontag so decisively undermines the reformist intentions of the documentary tradition, not just because of what photography is – although that doesn’t help – but also because of how it channels the worst impulses of the culture that both produces and consumes it. For some clue to Sontag’s motivation in undertaking the project we can turn to a long interview Jonathan Cott conducted with her in 1978. to explore the meaning of this essay, with emphasis on the function and implication of such images in mass culture. First appearing in Rolling Stone magazine, the complete interview was only published after her death. 19th] century,” (OP, pg. ( Log Out /  The lack of differentiation between the conclusions she is able to draw by looking at often rather diverse areas of photographic practice is in itself telling. The penultimate essay in the book, Photographic Evangels, examines the often contradictory views about the medium that have been held by some of its more forward-thinking advocates. Anyone interested in the social roles of photography will find this book fascinating and thought-provoking. 160) this being, not least, the origin of the ‘surrealist sensibility’ she identified earlier. The penultimate essay in the book, Photographic Evangels, examines the often contradictory views about the medium that have been held by some of its more forward-thinking advocates. 167) Of course, this impression is more apparent than actual, now that her ‘paper ghosts’ have become so many pixels and streams of data, but it does illustrate the extent to which Sontag’s ideas might still be put to use, or at least serve as a point of departure, whatever flaws the book as a whole might possess. [iv] To her, Arbus appears as the logical endpoint of photography’s inherent tendency towards a colonisation of the real, with the photographer aggressively co-opting other people’s lives and then inserting them as mere characters in her own aesthetic melodrama without any sense of responsibility for how they are depicted. 48), whose most tangible result is the calculated deadening of our moral response to the world as it is pictured, an ideological slight-of-hand perpetrated by the photographer as the – often all too willing – agent of larger social forces. Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933. The opening essay, In Plato’s Cave, begins with an assumption that has become increasingly familiar, that there are – or were, then – more photographs in the world than ever and that their very pervasiveness has changed how we see the world. 132.) 154) What she has in mind is not a simplistic duality of the real and the pictured – there is, in that sense, no ‘reality’ that isn’t somehow represented – but of photography as a system of information, a way of ordering and so, controlling our relationship to and understanding of the world, fundamentally defined by the characteristics of the medium and what it makes possible: “reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” (OP, pg. It makes you eager. In fact, the thread linking the first and second essays in the book is actually the basic position that Sontag will continue to occupy throughout. But different social formations will have different demands – and, consequently – a different set of uses for photography, as well as a different relationship to the images they produce. Susan Sontag’s fame was always paradoxical. Chris Lydon interviews Susan Sontag after the release of her 1992 novel The Volcano Lovers Susan Sontag attempts to argue that the American photographers have shifted from presenting the American experience as vital and inclusive (Walter Evans, Steichen) to cold and disinterested (Diane Arbus). The idea that photography interposes itself between reality and our perception (or understanding) of it, is part of a critique of representation, all the more urgent in the case of photography precisely because it naturalises its status as representation, that is, as a coded – and therefore inherently biased – depiction of its subject. The third essay, Melancholy Objects, is also perhaps the most wide-ranging, but it turns on what Sontag sees as being the basic tendency of the modern sensibility, a taste for the surreal, and its place in photography, which to her is a ‘surrealist’ medium like no other, not because of how it was used by the members of that historical movement, with their hackneyed repertoire of solarisation and double exposures, but more importantly, because of how photography works to transform the visible. Sontag discusses in the six essays not only the philosophical question of how reality may be perceived and knowledge gained, but she also reviews photography in its context: as a tool, an industry, an activity that "imposes a way of seeing" and therefore, actually alters reality. Of course, it’s not the case that Sontag treats reality as a sort of finite resource that will be ‘used up’ by being duplicated photographically. As everything she wrote, Susan Sontag's book on photography is brilliant. On Photography - a collection of essays by Susan Sontag - explores what the title suggests: a take on the importance, history and nature of the medium of photography. Susan Sontag’s “ On photography” is a philosophical reasoning about the “still images” that change our world. It’s difficult to name any other piece of sustained writing on the subject of photography that has gained the same kind of audience, whatever else might be said about its influence one way or another. The documentary explores Sontag's life through archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as her own words, as read by Patricia Clarkson. 178) which perhaps helps to explain photography’s persistent ‘usurping’ of reality – though certainly doesn’t excuse it. It’s probably a source of bemusement for some that Susan Sontag’s venerable 1977 book On Photography still serves as an entry point into the nebulous world of photographic theory for a great many readers. Writers Susan Sontag and Ulrich Keller have both written about the image. “On Photographyis to my mind the most original and illuminating study of the subject.”—Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker. It is required reading for anyone interested in Sontag, presenting a more rounded and indeed more sympathetic portrait of her than is usually the case. Sontag’s On Photography is one of the most quoted academic works on the subject of photograph, and generally comes up any time you’re having a serious discussion about photography. Her book is a collection of six essays that explore photography in the deepest of manners. Her conversations with her partner, and seminal author Susan Sontag, tell a beautiful story of a partners influence on an artists practice. It's all about paying attention. 75) Indeed, to criticise this ‘sensibility’ and its failure to deliver a new vision of the world implicit in the ‘surrealist’ ambition is also a critique of modernity itself, of the hopes invested in technological development and in ‘progress’ generally. Your email address will not be published. But, if there is, at times, a significant and often fatal gap between her presentation of individual cases and the conclusions she draws from them, this does not entirely invalidate some of those conclusions, or the basic worth of her ambition to come to grips with the role of photography in society. ', and 'Do stuff. Sontag’s On Photography is one of the most quoted academic works on the subject of photograph, and generally comes up any time you’re having a serious discussion about photography. [iii] Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin, 2008, pg. Photography entered the scene as an upstart activity, which seemed to encroach on and diminish an accredited art: painting. How closely photographs seems to ‘copy’ the visible gives the medium a kind of authority that is ultimately false, and is, in fact, central to the core deceptions that define an industrialised consumer society. For her, photography is the archetypal mass media form, making the distinctive values of the fine art tradition irrelevant. Passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, Susan Sontag became one of the most important … [i] The other perennial is, of course, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, responsible for otherwise apparently sensible people using words like “punctum” with abandon. Susan Sontag’s fame was always paradoxical. The real burden of the essay, then, and what she has been leading up to, is the idea that photography interposes itself between us and the ‘real world’ in a way that merely looks like engagement, but is in fact satisfied with a symbolic, morally immobilising gesture: “Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events. “To photograph,” she says, “is to appropriate the thing photographed”[iii] and this ‘appropriation’ comes to serve as a substitute for the real world, which is progressively obscured by the traffic in photographs, what Sontag later calls the ‘image-world,’ supposedly running in parallel to the real one. “Now,” she says, “all art aspires to the condition of photography.” (OP, pg. 4. Throughout World War Two, photographs were used as a means of The title, On Photographs, alludes to Susan Sontag’s influential and groundbreaking On Photography. 24, pg. However astute the reading of her many examples may be, then – and the treatment of Arbus is perhaps exemplary in this regard – the dependence on this single assumption about the medium overall fails to convince, not least because of how indiscriminately it is applied, and because the comparisons she attempts to draw on the basis of it are ultimately too broad to be meaningful. The result is a kind moral, as well as historical amnesia, having “devolved into an easy irony that democratizes all evidence, that equates its scatter of evidence for history.” (OP, pg. ( Log Out /  The ‘vision’ of any photographer will always be bounded by the constraints of the medium, making the individual, stylistic unity of any comparably advanced art impossible. Previous Post: End of the Pier: Martin Parr in New Brighton, Next Post: The Morals of Vision: Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ Revisited (Part 2), Long Reads or why Susan Sontag is so 1980 – Stuart Murdoch, What We’re Reading: Week of 3rd July | JHIBlog, One topic different perspective. 82), The next two essays, The Heroism of Vision and Photographic Evangels, are further variations on this theme. For Sontag, perhaps the best exemplar of this tradition was Edward Weston, whose views she astutely (and amusingly) compares to the woolly pontificating of DH Lawrence. In Sontag’s opinion, it has been necessary for them to ‘evangelise’ in order to define what, if anything, separates their own output from the vast, undifferentiated terrain of photography as such. 121), Placing this assertion of an ‘individual creative vision’ at the heart of how photography is positioned as art, especially and increasingly in the context of art institutions, is, for Sontag, yet another marker of the desire to legitimise what she calls its “voracious way of seeing”. In her monumental 1977 collection of essays dedicated to the photographic medium, Susan Sontag wrote: ”Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it.” If we were to define documentary photography, this statement might just be the right description, because in its essence, it is a form of image-making aiming to chronicle the events and … Sontag’s writing has a sureness of tone, a certainty, that seems to have guaranteed its lasting authority. It made no sense that a writer publishing in the so-called little magazines, like Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, on topics like structuralist philosophy or the history of interpretation, could cross over to become a major literary star. The surrealist’s search for ‘the other’ is ultimately no different from what motivates documentary photographers, who are little more than socio-economic tourists in other people’s lives: “The view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down […] marks the confluence of the Surrealist counter-culture and middle-class social adventurism.” (OP, pg. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. 30) Framed in this way, the ‘advanced’ photographer is by necessity no more insightful than the snap-happy tourist, in that both are satisfied to merely collect the world, rather than trying to understand it, and worse, the self-consciously ‘artistic’ photographer most often appropriates the private realities of other people, for no less questionable ends. Susan Sontag’s On Photography is one of the best studies of photography that you can find. Sontag recognised the medium as a product of modernity, the social formations of which have instrumentalised photography in particular ways, entirely reflective of its own historical contradictions; her critique of photography, then, is indirectly a critique of modernity itself, in the form of what she repeatedly describes as an ‘industrialised consumer’ society. The forces at work in that society are historically unique to it, or to the Western world at any rate, and elaborate a particular set of ideas about what is real. And they depict an individual temperament, discovering itself though the camera’s cropping of reality.” (OP, pg. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in … The assessment of her work that Sontag elaborates here is remarkably lucid, though perhaps also a little vitriolic. But why should that be? She begins, perhaps surprisingly, with Walt Whitman. This is precisely her concern with what photography cannot do, which is transcend how the (sometimes passive, sometimes destructive) appropriation of reality that is at the heart of the medium undercuts the aspiration toward moral insight that its leading exponents, in their most Whitmanesque moods, were wont to claim, not least because the idea of the individual creative vision at stake here is fundamentally the product of an industrialised consumer society, whose motivations in this sphere she has already critiqued at some length: “Photographing, and thereby redeeming the homely, trite and humble is also an ingenious means of individual expression.” (OP pg. Sontag’s essays on photography are considered one of the classic starting points for anyone wanting to learn more about photography than simply how exposure, focusing, and post-processing works. It’s probably a source of bemusement for some that Susan Sontag’s venerable 1977 book On Photography still serves as an entry point into the nebulous world of photographic theory for a great many readers. It was first articulated by John Berger in 1978, see ‘The Uses of Photography’ in Understanding a Photograph, Geoff Dyer (ed. Susan Sontag – Quotes from ‘On Photography’ mickyates April 10, 2019 ContextualResearch , Critical Research Journal , Critical Theory , Documentary , ICWeek11 , Ideas , Informing Contexts , Media Theory , Photography , Portrait , Quotes Leave a Comment Here’s the rub with Sontag, though: if she isn’t right, she isn’t entirely wrong either. 41) In this case, the result “suggest[s] a naïveté that is both coy and sinister, for it is based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.” (OP, pg. 110). Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. But if photography may indeed be used to ‘collect’ the world, reducing reality to a spectacle, as Sontag repeatedly insists, it does not automatically follow that this will have the same motivation or the same consequences in each case. [iii] It is much more plausible to say that photography is not merely appropriating (or ‘collecting,’ or ‘colonising’) the real world, but just that it can be used in this way, and yet, for her, photography’s use as appropriation becomes simply photography’s appropriation, without any regard for the different contexts in which this might occur – or rather, by collapsing all those different contexts together. The sensibility she identifies here as characteristic of the medium – and of the times – is one that has willingly accepted the apparent dead-lock that it embodies: “Photographers […] suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.” (OP, pg. Pay attention. (Editor’s Note: Susan Sontag was, in my opinion, a seminal intellectual, and she authored On Photography, a photographer’s theory manifesto of sorts. We prefer images to reality, she says, “partly in response to the ways in which the notion of what is real has been progressively complicated and weakened, one of the early ways being the criticism of reality as façade which arose among the enlightened middle classes in the last [i.e. The Morals of Vision: Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ Revisited (Part 1) June 13, 2017 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Susan Sontag, 1972. The hallmark of what she calls the surrealist sensibility, and what she insists it shares with photography as a medium, is the tendency to view reality as a succession of atomised fragments, all more or less fit for the collector’s attention, and, in the process, entirely flattening the social and political dimensions of that reality. 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