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On Photography by Susan Sontag, 1977 Anchor Books.
ISBN 0-385-26706-1. 208 pages. You can order this book from amazon.com
.
Go into a bookstore with a photography criticism section. Pick up a book and
open it to a random page. If the text on the page seems laughably incoherent then
you've gotten hold of something written by a university professor. These books
really ought to be pulped at the bindery with a few copies reserved for the
author's tenure committee but for some reason they occasionally make it past the
book buyer at a reputable store and hence you end up reading feminist
deconstruction of a diamond jewelry ad.
It is a shame that the university types manage to take up shelf space that
could be devoted to more copies of these essays from The New York Review of
Books and books by real photographers.
Sontag first explains why it is necessary to step back and think about
photographs:
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its
age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is
not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are
a great many more images around, claiming our attention. ... In teaching us a new
visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking
at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more
importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the
photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole word
in our heads--as an anthology of images.
Sontag quickly dispenses with the notion that photography is a form of
note-taking: "[The Farm Security Administration photographs] would take dozens of
frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they
had gotten just the right look on film--the precise expression on the subject's
face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture,
exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring
one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their
subjects."
People take pictures of their family: "A family's photograph album is
generally about the extended family--and often, is all that remains of it."
People
take pictures on vacation: "The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and
assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by
travel. ... [Taking pictures] gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph,
and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless
work ethic--Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety
which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and
supposed to be having fun."
Anyway, people take pictures.
Subjects
In many portions of On Photography, Sontag considers why
photographers love taking pictures of losers. She notes that, unless there is
already favorable public sentiment, these pictures very seldom persuade anyone to
care.
Technique
Sontag
doesn't seem to know much about how photography is accomplished. Rather than just
say this, she casually drops random comments throughout her text intended to show
the opposite (e.g., she thinks that a Hasselblad is somehow a typical camera for
taking pictures of distant animals in Africa). Despite this handicap, she has an
interesting section about how photographers pretend to be artists. For example,
Ansel Adams claiming that "A photograph is not an accident--it is a concept. The
'machine-gun' approach to photography--by which many negatives are made with the
hope that one will be good--is fatal to serious results." Sontag notes (correctly
in my opinion) that there is an element of luck in most great pictures.
I was here to find the date and publisher of the book because in writing a master's thesis on photography I felt, for some reason, the need to quote from it. Somewhere in the book I remember Sontag refering to the act of photographing (especially for tourists) as one that distances the photographer from the reality that is the subject--objectifying strange cultures with the camera so that they might not experience culture shock. I am actually interested in this idea, not because I agree with all of it, but because I agree with the part about photography distancing one from reality, yet I have a different interpretation. I think of this aspect of photography as one that can help be a vehicle for the artist to see in a more broad way the reality that he or she has grown used to ignoring. I feel that because the viewfinder unifies what is within it, this can be seen as a tool for discovering harmony between realities that are generally seen (incorrectly) as dichotomies. There is a Zen Buddhist term that is best translated as "beginner's mind" that speaks of the mental openness and receptivity characteristic of a beginner or a child. This is often what the poetry of the camera speaks about; that through photographing, one can see in a new way and can begin to break down the dichotomies such as beautiful/ugly, sacred/profane and discover a more wholistic and harmonious world.
I like Sontag's work a lot. I think she could be a
little more receptive to postmodernism, as such.
Especially since she admires Baudrillard and
Barthes. I mean, if you drink beer, you like to
drink? Sometimes? No?
I agree with Sontag viz. television--the soul
destruction of the universe.
I would like to know what Sontag thinks of the
"horrible" (yet horribly attractive to a 26 year
old straight male) "Spize Gurls"?
Before reading Sontag's book, you may want to
start with Walter Benjamin's famous and
enormously influential essay "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." As his
title suggest, Benjamin discusses much more than
photography, and I think his reflections would be
of interest to any photographer.
You can find the essay in a collection entitled
_Illumuminations_, edited with an introduction by
Hannah Arendt.
Re: above comments by Charles G. Ruberto, concerning Susan Sontag interpreting Walter Benjamin (philosophicaly that is). Please see her astonishing essay, actually a review, __ The Last Intellectual__
which appeared originally in The New York Review of Books on October 10, 1978,as a review of
Reflections: Essays, Aporisms, Autobiographical Writings by Walter Benjamin
.
Mr. Greespun displays an anti-intellectualism and
contempt for academics that betrays his own
ignorance. Part of what makes Sontag and her work
so special is that she has a constrained yet sharp
critical faculty, not one as blind and naive as
Greenspun's blanket condemnations of academic
analysis. At least I agree that Sontag's book is
one of the best I have ever come across.
After reading the review of Susan Sontag's On Photography by Philip Greenspun I'm wondering if the reviewer has any other such insightful techniques for evaluating a book like, "open it to a random page?" Does the reviewer only read books that make sense from the middle outwards (or backwards or upside-down for that matter)? Which books are these? If we apply this standard to math and science we should be able pick up an advanced physics text, open it to any page and immediately "get it." Perhaps we should judge a photograph by viewing only a square inch selected at random; if it "seems laughably incoherent" then we will know we are viewing a picture made by someone who hasn't had a thought since USA Today told him to (and what it should be). Mr. Greenspun, where on earth did you ever get the idea that if you don't understand something it must not be understandable? I fail to see the value of this kind of commentary, unless the point is to advance a "don't be fooled by an intellectual challenge, it's only presented to humiliate you" argument. In which case, I will continue to make a fool of myself by reading everything I can get my hands because maybe, just maybe, I will learn something.
>Part of what makes Sontag and her work so special is that she has a
>constrained yet sharp critical faculty, not one as blind and naive
>as Greenspun's blanket condemnations of academic analysis.
This comment interested me, because even though I agree that Mr. Greenspun's review is anti-intellectual and frankly not very useful, I found many of Sontag's assertations to be astoundingly unsupported by any evidence (even anecdotal) at all, and most of the book reads like unfocused, unresearched academic rambling.
It seems to me that much of what she writes, from her base notions (Photography is an essentially surrealist act, the desire of photography is "to capture" something, etc.) to her small asides, are easily debatable if not disprovable altogether.
It saddens me that this is considered to be an important book "On Photography" because in addition to my comments above, Sontag comes off as so hostile towards the very act of photography (be it fine art, commercial or family snapshots) that it amazes me that I have been able to read the book to the end. Unfortunately, since it is such an important book, one must read it, but in the end I wonder if it's really worth it.
Quite frankly, you will not have missed a single thing if you do not read Susan Sontag--not merely on photography, but as regards any other issue with which she might have decided to reckon in her needless career. Privately, I do not believe Ms. Sontag knows a Nikon from nicotene; however, while I mostly doubt she is repentant about her confusion on anything involving the smoke from the one, or the heiroglyphs of the other, I am quite willing to believe Ms. Sontag is by nature vain, and easy enough in her manners to expostulate where she really ought cogitate, and that such works as "On Photography" ideally become her peculiar form of self appreciation. Moreover, I'm sure Ms. Sontag is gloriously happy to be thought intelligent by sophomores and feminists everywhere, albeit I suspect she holds her breath in substantial company, lest she be found out. Where's the beer? p.s. i really do believe the above criticism will, if given due consideration, result in better photographs. if not, i'm sure the beer will.
Troll alert re: Philip's review. Or, but then again, it surprises me not. ;-)
I can't believe Philip would dismiss this book as he did. What was he expecting when he read Sontag's work? Another dime a dozen how-to book? Or course he was disappointed. But is there nothing more to photography than what aperture to set the latest gizmo at? I have read the first half of this book (had to return it to the library before I moved cities, etc.), and it is on my long list of reading, including Roland Barthes'
Camera Lucida. Clearly Philip recognizes the importance of understanding photography as a cultural phenomenon, as one of the many ways humans communicate to one another, and change our understanding of the world. Sontag is just one of a number of important works to read on it- you needn't agree with it.
As for it being an "unresearched academic rambling," this is an
essay, not a peer-reviewed academic paper, nor a technical manual, a la Hedgecoe or Adams. It is a reflection of photography's place in our culture. It is a series of intellectual opinions pulled into a longer, narrative essay. An informed commentary about photography's place in our civilization. No, you won't get facts about how many photographs where taken in Europe between 1940 and 1944, or how people's attitudes about war changed according to polls taken because of such and such photograph. You certainly won't get any tips on how to operate a rangefinder camera. And no, sorry to disappoint some of the above critics, it doesn't have to be written by a photographer. It's important to read because it offers cogent and articulate arguments, a basis for all, photographers and viewers of photographs, to continue the discourse. It might might need updating in the post-Photoshop world, or with the proliferation of web publishing.
But it's silly and, yes, anti-intellectual, to dismiss it because it doesn't have 'researched evidence,' or because the author shows no technical acumen about Nikons, or because Phil chose not to get it.
Sontag's book, On Photography, is insufferable: platitudinous, sesquipedelian, scattered, presumptuous, prosaic, pompous, imprecise, full of intellectualized common knowledge and generally dismissive toward the penis. Unforgivably, she misreads the work of Arbus (as if she never saw the work); and I'm not even on page 50 yet!
All tolled, it is a clear reflection (the only thing about it that is clear) of the mind-rot prevailing in the 1970s. In light of the fevered debate around this exceedingly weak book, I'm glad to have (mostly) missed that decade.
