civilized ku # 2724 / what is a photograph? # 11 ~ Today everyhitng exists to end in aphotograph
Thursday, May 15, 2014 at 10:43AM 
spilled milk ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
what is a photograph? # 11 ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenSusan Sontag had much to write/ state, amongst many other things, about photography. Her writings on the medium and its apparatus (aka: its conventions, language, and traditions) were provocative and in some quarters quite controversial. And, as with most of her writing, it was set against her critiques of modern society, culture, and politics. Nevertheless, IMO, the collection of her essays, Sontag's seminal work on photography - On Photography, explores a host of interesting topics and ground on the subject:
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world - all of these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
In writing the above, Sontag's "today" was circa 1973-77. One can only imagine what her idea of today's photography / image saturated world might be. In that same era, Sontag also wrote:
Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing - which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite .....
Holy twitter / flickr / tumblr / instagram / et all, Batman. I, for one would love to read/hear her thoughts on those "social rite(s)".
I am re-reading On Photography primarily because I am becoming rather fixated on the idea of what is a photograph? and I appreciate the fact that the book is not an academic term paper - according to one source, "Sontag's work is literary and polemical rather than academic." I'll second that idea.
In any event, re: the question what is a photograph?, Sontag has much to say relative to my preoccupation with the question. a few excerpts:
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refuting it .... Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks .... Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: " There is the surface. Now think - or rather feel, intuit - what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way." Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.
I think I'm going to get much more out of this re-reading than I did the first time around. Highly recommended if you can stick with it.
Reader Comments (1)
Interesting excerpts ... and from the early 70's as well. I guess there really isn't anything new under the Sun.