susan sontag on documentary photography

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. It's all about paying attention. For Sontag, the most telling example of this hollow equivalence was Diane Arbus. be clenched, curious. [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. Change ). Writers Susan Sontag and Ulrich Keller have both written about the image. – Kaybaisdenphotography. 52-53. [ii] Obviously, the film raised official objections from the Chinese authorities because of the extent to which it contradicted the myth of a glorious worker’s republic, but Sontag’s main concern is not the film itself, though she does admit it is somewhat condescending. Further citations as ‘RS’ in the text. 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. On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. 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. Susan Sontag – Quotes from ‘On Photography’ | Yatesweb 48) Sontag counters this observation with a list of her own, consisting of more ‘positive’ words she used to describe, if perhaps not photography itself, then at least the experience of looking at pictures, such as: “fascinate, haunt, entrance, inspire, delight.” It is arguable, however, that for most readers the apparently negative terms have had a more lasting currency and are the ones most often cited in relation to her view of the medium. 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. [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. “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted,” Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933–December 28, 2004) wrote in her timeless 1977 treatise on photography, an inquiry of uncanny and swelling timeliness today.She had been tussling with and incubating these ideas — this growing concern with … 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. [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. [i] It is also, in many ways, a summary of the issues she has been outlining all along, in particular how the production and consumption of photography affects our relationship to the ‘real’ world, shaping – and in her view, undermining – the capacity for understanding it. 52) there is precious little evidence of that enthusiasm in the text. 4. But much more damning is the extent to which what she calls his “habit of photographic seeing” (OP, pg. By now the pattern that the essays establish should be obvious. Essay #6: The Image World. Each essay - of which there are five - was originally circulated periodically in the New York Review of Books between 1973-1977. […] Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention.” (OP, pg. In On Photography, Susan Sontag claims, “Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder,” making a startling, yet valid accusation that a camera is a weapon, able to manipulate and take ownership of anything in its path. And that brings us, at last, to the final essay in the book. But it is also a fairly tendential argument, in that it depends on a deliberately narrow reading of photography’s effects, or at least on a set of assumptions about what photography should (or shouldn’t) do, rather than on what it actually does. 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. [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. 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. (Editor’s Note: Susan Sontag was, in my opinion, a seminal intellectual, and she authored On Photography, a photographer’s theory manifesto of sorts. 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. At the same time, most readers would probably find it difficult to parse the line of argument actually taken in the book, which is perhaps more known for its near endless quotability, than for what, precisely, Sontag has to say. In this we have Sontag’s example – as well as her mistakes – to guide us, and for that, if nothing else, we should be grateful. Among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus's work with that of Depression-era documentary photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration. Chris Lydon interviews Susan Sontag after the release of her 1992 novel The Volcano Lovers 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. ( Log Out /  The result, in her view, is that “every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation” and is, consequently, “analgesic morally”. It also ranges widely – if, at times, very selectively – across the history and practice of photography. 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. Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933. The assessment of her work that Sontag elaborates here is remarkably lucid, though perhaps also a little vitriolic. What concerns her is the way in which photography modifies – and distorts – our relationship to the world around us, obscuring the connections that make understanding ‘reality’ possible on a social, historical and political level, in favour of an ‘image’ that is, quite literally, depth-less. “Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. ( Log Out /  ), Penguin, 2013, pgs. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. 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 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. First published in 1977, it brings together a series of nonfiction pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. 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. 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. I recently read it while developing an aesthetics class that is … Susan Sontag’s fame was always paradoxical. Click an icon to Log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account about China the! 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