[Leica] Sontag & Photography

[Afterswift at aol.com (Afterswift@aol.com)]

Dear Colleagues,

I think Sontag gave photography too much credit -- we regard it as blame -- 
for how our society sees itself and creates itself in some image she doesn't 
like and thinks is unhealthy. I don't think she blames photographers for 
that. 
She thought that capitalist system that parlays sex, luxury, etc. was its 
cause 
and is promoted by the photographic image. That the photographer is an 
unwitting part of the system.

It's the images she saw that affected her that way at a certain moment in 
her 
life. As a critical observer she ran with that idea. In a later book she 
reversed a lot of her thinking in On Photography. The world had changed and 
so did 
she. 

However, that psychological and sociological case she makes against the 
commercial photographic image in the US and the nature of still photography 
isn't 
the whole story and it wasn't what I was looking for in Sontag's work. There 
is 
a sideband in On Photography that has nothing to do with the critical theme 
although Sontag thinks that it is part of her critical context. 

For example, here are a few quotes I underlined from On Photography: "The 
less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive -- the more 
authoritative the photograph is likely to be." 

"What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message 
from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class."

"Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. 
Photographs are." [That's something to think about. Do photographers 
transfigure the world. Are we aware of what we're doing? Or is Susan wrong? 
That's 
mindstretching.] 

"Indeed, the very extent to which that photograph [Che Guevara's body laid 
out on a stretcher in the presence of the Bolivian military and a US 
intelligence agent] is unforgettable indicates its potential for being 
depoliticized, for 
becoming a timeless image."

"Cartier-Bresson has likened himself to a Zen archer, who must become the 
target so as to be able to hit it; "'thinking should be done before and 
afterwards," he says, "'never while actually taking the photograph.'" 

"Benjamin thought that a photograph, being a mechanically reproduced object, 
could not have genuine presence. It could be argued, however, that the very 
situation .... has revealed that photographs do possess a kind of 
authenticity." 


Sontag quotes Nietzsche: To experience a thing as beautiful means to 
experience it necessarily wrongly. Sontag is alluding to -- I think 
incorrectly -- to 
the effect that certain photos have in sanitizing an ugly reality by giving 
it 
an esthetic composition, which a competent photographer instinctively does.

Hey, photographers are thinking human beings. And that's what Sontag is all 
about, whether she's right or wrong. She prods us to think! So I mourn her 
passing, as I would any hardworking writer who has something to say and who 
does 
her/his preparation well and respects her/his readers.

Bob