Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/12/28
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>Pedantic, self-important, at times so far off-base she wasn't even on the >field. >And yet at times so brilliantly insightful one cannot escape reading her. -------------------------------------------------- I'll miss Susan Sontag because she had the courage to change her mind in her latest book about photography. She had a tendency of going to extremes, following her own logic to the end of the line. But that's OK, like taking the trolley to its final stop, not knowing where that stop is. As she wrote she investigated the subject. And then, in time, she returned taking the opposite lane. But she wasn't all that original when it came to critiquing media dialectically. Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide on the French-Spanish border just before his group of refugees from the Nazis found refuge, wrote very deeply about photography, asserting that it didn't have the 'aura' of an original work because it was related to 'mechanical reproduction.' I think Benjamin was wrong, but he opened a way to think and write about photography from an intellectual (Marxist) POV. A well-known French philosopher, whose name escapes me now, wrote a little book taking the opposite tack on photography, using a small photo of his mother as a child to evoke her reality. On these long, cold winter months in the Northern Hemisphere reading Sontag and Benjamin makes for enjoyable evenings. These books are in all the libraries. They can only deepen us as photographers. Bob