On Photography

Read for my On Instagram Research. Purchased from ye olde Amazon.co.uk

Bibliographic Deets

 * Sontag, Susan 1977 (2008). On Photography. Penguin, London.

Overview
For critic Susan Sontag, interrogating the photograph as a social and cultural object reveals the very ideology of the 20th century. Shifts in photographic practice, in ways of presenting and producing photographs, in techniques of approaching and disseminating photos all contribute to an obsession with surface, visibility, and documentation of 'truth' in the modern era.

Sontag apparently began these essays for the New York Review of Books, and only collected them later on.

In Plato's Cave

 * "Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth" (3) -> One of the greatest openings to an essay ever


 * "In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we 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 world in our heads- as an anthology of images." (3) -> pretty much a summary of her points thruout the book


 * "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge- and therefore, like power." (4)


 * "A Photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened" (5)


 * "Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph- any photograph- seems to have more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects" (6)


 * "unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something 'out there' just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast-form of note-taking, or the shutter-bug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life." (6)


 * "From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope" (7)


 * "That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed - seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures" (7)


 * "As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art" (8)


 * "Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. ... This 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. ... a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures" (9-10)


 * "Picture taking is an event in itself and one with ever more peremptory rights- to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on" (11)


 * "After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed" (11)


 * Vertov's Man with A Movie Camera (12)


 * Antonioni's Blow-Up (13)


 * "Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive" (14)


 * "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves" (14)


 * "All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt" (15)


 * "Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change, while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing." (15-16)


 * "... all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempt to contact or lay claim to another reality" (16)


 * "Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy." (23)


 * "Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is no addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; its is is the most most irresistible form of mental pollution." (24)

America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly
Sontag traces a history of American photography, starting with what she claims is the early "Whitmanesque" movement in which the poetry and beauty of America is sought out and brought forward in photos. This is the photography of Walker Evans and Stieglitz, which finds a heroism in the everyday and even remote American. But this is overturned by a second wave of Americans whose disenchantment (postwar, postmodern) begins to celebrate or at least examine America's strangeness. This is WeeGee and Diane Arbus, whose photos find America as the quintessential Surrealist subject.

Melancholy Objects

 * "The view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has informed photography from the beginning, and marks the confluence of the surrealist counterculture and middle class social adventurism" (55)


 * THE FLANEUR -> "In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eyes of the middle-class flaneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world 'picturesque'" (55)


 * "But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own" (57)


 * "Photography in Europe was largely guided by notions of the picturesque (i.e. the poor, the foreign, the time-worn), the important (i.e. the rich, the famous), and the beautiful. Photographs tended to praise or aim at neutrality. Americans, less convinced of the permanence of any basic social arrangements, experts on the 'reality' and the inevitability of change, have more often made photography partisan" (63)

* "Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects- unpremeditated slices of the world" (69)


 * "What is true of photographs is true of the world seen photographically. Photography extends the eighteenth-century literati's discovery of the beauty of ruins into a genuinely popular taste." (79)

The Heroism of Vision

 * "People want the idealized image: a photograph of themselves looking their best." (85)


 * "The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer- a scribe, not a poet." (88)


 * "There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened up a new model of freelance activity- allowing each person to display a certain unique, avid sensibility" (89)


 * "[Walter] Benjamin thought the right caption beneath a picture could 'rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.' He urged that writers start taking photographs to show the way." (107)

The Image World

 * "Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images; and philosophers since Platon have tried to loosen our dependence on images by evoking the standard of an image-free way of apprehending the real." (153)


 * "... images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an imagine (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask" (154)


 * "The further back we go in history, as E.H. Gombrich has observed, the less sharp is the distinction between images and real things; in primitive societies the thing and its image were simply two different, that is, physically distinct, manifestations of the same energy of spirit." (155)


 * "we have in a photograph surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing, a possession which gives photographs some of the character of unique objects. Through photographs, we also have a consumer's relation to events, both to events which are part of our experience and to those which are not- a distinction between types of experience that such habit-forming consumership blurs." (155-156)


 * "Through being photographed, something becomes part of a system of information, fitted into schemes of classification and storage" (156)


 * "The technology that has already minimized the extent to which the distance separating photographer from subjects ... [and] shrunk the interval between sighting the picture and holding it in one's hands (from the first Kodak, when it took weeks for a developed roll of film to be returned to the amateur photographer, to the Polaroid, which ejects the image in a few seconds) " (157)


 * "Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed because, unlike the earlier ones, it is not dependent on an image maker" (158)


 * "It is not reality that photographs make immediately accesible, but images" (165)


 * "Like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end, the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away." (167)


 * "In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image world, it has happened and it will forever happen in that way" (168)


 * "The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself" (179)

satisfied: first, because all the possibilities of photograph are infinite; and second, because the project is self-devouring" (179)
 * "As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. As like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be


 * "If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well" (180)