On Photography - lab404

1 On PhotographyBY SUSAN SONTAGC opyrightOn PhotographyCopyright 1973 by Susan SontagPublished by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & GirouxCover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright 2005 by RosettaBooks, LLCAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or repro-duced in any manner whatsoever without written permissionexcept in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articlesand information address electronic edition published 2005 by RosettaBooks LLC,New 0-7953-2699-8On PhotographyiiContentseForeword(A one pager by SS, May 1977)In Plato s CaveAmerica, Seen Through Photographs, DarklyMelancholy ObjectsThe Heroism of VisionPhotographic EvangelsThe Image-WorldA Brief Anthology of Quotations (Homage to )About this TitleOn PhotographyiiieForewordOne of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photographyfirst appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as a progressof essays about the meaning and career of photographs.

2 It beginswith the famous In Plato s Cave essay, then offers five otherprose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinatingand far-reaching Brief Anthology of Quotations. A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic imageshave made in our way of looking at the world and at ourselvesover the last 140 years. Washington Post Book World Every page of On Photography raises important and excitingquestions about its subject and raises them in the best way. TheNew York Times Book Review On Photography is to my mind the most original and illuminatingstudy of the subject. Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker .Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, received her from the College of the University ofChicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, andtheology at Harvard University and Saint Anne s College, human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontagserved from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center ofPEN, the international writers organization dedicated to freedomof expression and the advancement of literature, from whichOn Photographyvplatform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecutedand imprisoned Ms.

3 Sontag s many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize ofthe German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the2001 Jerusalem Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Awardfor On Photography (1978).RosettaBooks is the leading publisher dedicated exclusively toelectronic editions of great works of fiction and non-fiction thatreflect our world. RosettaBooks is a committed e-publisher,maximizing the resources of the Web in opening a freshdimension in the reading experience. In this electronic readingenvironment, each RosettaBook will enhance the experiencethrough The RosettaBooks Connection. This gateway instantlydelivers to the reader the opportunity to learn more about thetitle, the author, the content and the context of each work, usingthe full resources of the experience The RosettaBooks Connection for On PhotographyviIt all started with one essay about some of the problems, aestheticand moral, posed by the omnipresence of photographed images; butthe more I thought about what photographs are, the more complexand suggestive they became.

4 So one generated another, and that one(to my bemusement) another, and so on a progress of essays, aboutthe meaning and career of photographs until I d gone far enoughso that the argument sketched in the first essay, documented anddigressed from in the succeeding essays, could be recapitulated andextended in a more theoretical way; and could essays were first published (in a slightly different form) inThe New York Review of Books, and probably would never havebeen written were it not for the encouragement given by its editors,my friends Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, to my obsession withphotography. I am grateful to them, and to my friend Don EricLevine, for much patient advice and unstinting 1977On PhotographyviiIn Plato s CaveHumankind lingers unregenerately in Plato s cave, still reveling,its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educatedby photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanalimages.

5 For one thing, there are a great many more images around,claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and sincethen just about everything has been photographed, or so it very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the termsof confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visualcode, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worthlooking at and what we have a right to observe. They are agrammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally,the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to giveus the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads asan anthology of collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies andtelevision programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but withstill photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheapto produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard sLes Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are luredinto joining the King s Army by the promise that they will be ableto loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy,and get rich.

6 But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange andUlysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turnsout to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, ofMonuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature,Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasuresOn Photography1from around the globe. Godard s gag vividly parodies theequivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs areperhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, andthicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographsreally are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm ofconsciousness in its acquisitive photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. Itmeans putting oneself into a certain relation to the world thatfeels like knowledge and, therefore, like power. A now notoriousfirst fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the worldinto printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplusof Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern,inorganic societies.

7 But print seems a less treacherous form ofleaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, thanphotographic images, which now provide most of the knowledgepeople have about the look of the past and the reach of the is written about a person or an event is frankly aninterpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintingsand drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statementsabout the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality thatanyone can make or , which fiddle with the scale of the world,themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored,tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects;they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold;they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seemto invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set ontables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers andmagazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibitthem; publishers compile many decades the book has been the most influential wayof arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, therebyguaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality photographsare fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid and a wider photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, aphotograph loses much less of its essential quality whenOn Photography2reproduced in a book than a painting does.

8 Still, the book is nota wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographsinto general circulation. The sequence in which the photographsare to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothingholds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amountof time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker s film, Sij avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestratedmeditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests asubtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) stillphotographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking ateach photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visuallegibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed ina film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when servedup in furnish evidence. Something we hear about, butdoubt, seems proven when we re shown a photograph of it. Inone version of its utility, the camera record incriminates.

9 Startingwith their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup ofCommunards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool ofmodern states in the surveillance and control of their increasinglymobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camerarecord justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proofthat a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but thereis always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, whichis like what s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (throughamateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individualphotographer, a photograph any photograph seems to havea more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visiblereality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble imagelike Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty,unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, firstof all, to show something out there, just like the Polaroid ownerfor whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, orthe shutter-bug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirsof daily a painting or a prose description can never be other thanOn Photography3a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treatedas a narrowly selective transparency.

10 But despite the presumptionof veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest,seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no genericexception to the usually shady commerce between art and when photographers are most concerned with mirroringreality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste andconscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm SecurityAdministration photographic project of the late 1930s (amongthem Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee)would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecroppersubjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look onfilm the precise expression on the subject s face that supportedtheir own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture,exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture shouldlook, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers arealways imposing standards on their subjects.