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ON PHOTOGRAPHY Susan Sontag

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ON PHOTOGRAPHY Susan Sontag ON PHOTOGRAPHY ~ ~ ~\\eme tOt V'\l.'Co:t\~ ~ \'\\\0 'i!,~'\\tt'd\ C,.\tc'\\\'dt\()\\. Susan Sontag tht ~hat()'g,ta'j)\\~ ate to I \), tl;w. m<l\!t a\ 'j)a'g,~;;', Susan Sontag is an essayist and novelist. She has studied at Berkeley, Harvard, Ox­ to the recommendec ford, and the Sorbonne and considers herself a writer without specialization. Among amount of time to be her books are several works of criticism, Against Interpretation, On Photography, Chris Marker's film AIDS and Its Metaphors, as well as a novel, The Volcano, and a play, Alice in Bed. madaires (1966), a br ' tation on photograp~ suggests a subtler al packaging (and en]; o collect photographs is to collect the world. seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the Both the order and t~ T Movies and television programs light up world, of turning it into a mental object, than each photograph are walls, flicker, and go out; but with still pho­ photographic images, which now provide most gain in visual legibil tographs the image is also an object, lightweight, of the knowledge people have about the look of But photographs tral cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumu­ the past and the reach of the present. What is be collectible object late, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), written about a person or an event is frankly an served up in books. two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into interpretation, as are handmade visual state­ Photographs fur joining the King's Army by the promise that ments, like paintings and drawings. Pho­ we hear abollt, but ( they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do what­ tographed images do not seem to be statements we're shown a photc ever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. about the world so much as pieces of it, minia­ of its utility, the ca But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and tures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Starting with their us Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of murderous roundup their wives turns out to contain only picture the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, 1871, photographs postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They modern states in the Department Stores, Mammals, \X'onders of Na­ age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; their increasingly m ture, Methods of Transport, \X'orks of Art, and they disappear; they become valuable, and get other version of its ut other classified treasures from around the globe. bought and sold; they are reproduced. Pho­ tifies. A photograph Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal tographs, which package the world, seem to in­ p roof that a given th magic of the photographic image. Photographs vite packaging. They are stuck in albums, may distort; but thel are perhaps the most mysterious of all the ob­ framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, pro­ that something exists jects that make up, and thicken, the environ­ jected as slides. Newspapers and magazines fea­ what's in the picture ment we recognize as modern. Photographs re­ ture them; cops alphabetize them; museums ex­ (through amateurisrr ally are experience captured, and the camera is hibit them; publishers compile them. artistry) of the indivi the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive For many decades the book has been the tograph-any photc mood. most influential way of arranging (and usually more innocent, and t To photograph is to appropriate the thing miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guarantee­ lation to visible real photographed. It means putting oneself into a ing them longevity, if not immortality-pho­ objects. Virtuosi of t certain relation to the world that feels like tographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mis­ Stieglitz and Paul S knowledge-and, therefore, like power. A now laid-and a wider public. The photograph in a unforgettable p notorious first fall into alienation, habituating book is, obviously, the image of an image. But sti ll want, first of a people to abstract the world into printed words, since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth ob­ there," just like the is supposed to have engendered that surplus of ject, a photograph loses much less of its essential photographs are a Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to quality when reproduced in a book than a paint­ ing, or the build modern, inorganic societies. But print ing does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfac­ snapshots as 22 • On Photography 175 tory scheme for putting groups of photographs While a painting or a prose description can into general circulation. The sequence in which never be other than a narrowly selective inter­ the photographs are to be looked at is proposed pretation, a photograph can be treated as a nar­ by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers rowly selective transparency. But despite the to the recommended order or indicates the presumption of veracity that gives all pho­ amount of time to be spent on each photograph. tographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dro­ work that photographers do is no generic excep­ madaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated medi­ tion to the usually shady commerce between art tation on photographs of all sorts and themes, and truth. Even when photographers are most suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of concerned with mirroring reality, they are still packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and con­ Both the order and the exact time for looking at science. The immensely gifted members of the each photograph are imposed; and there is a Farm Security Administration photographic gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. project of the late 1930s (among them Walker But photographs transcribed in a film cease to Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) be collectible objects, as they still are when would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of served up in books. their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that Photographs furnish evidence. Something they had gotten just the right look on film-the we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when precise expression on the subject's face that sup­ we're shown a photograph of it. In one version ported their own notions about poverty, light, of its utility, the camera record incriminates. dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In Starting with their use by the Paris police in the deciding how a picture should look, in prefer­ murderous roundup of Communards in June ring one exposure to another, photographers are 1871, photographs became a useful tool of always imposing standards on their subjects. Al­ modern states in the surveillance and control of though there is a sense in which the camera does their increasingly mobile populations. In an­ indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, pho­ other version of its utility, the camera record jus­ tographs are as much an interpretation of the tifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible world as paintings and drawings are. Those oc­ proof that a given thing happened. The picture casions when the taking of photographs is rela­ may distort; but there is always a presumption tively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self­ that something exists, or did exist, which is like effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations whole enterprise. This very passivity-and ubiq­ (through amateurism) or pretensions (through uity-of the photographic record is photogra­ artistry) of the individual photographer, a pho­ phy's "message," its aggression. tograph-any photograph-seems to have a Images which idealize (like most fashion more innocent, and therefore more accurate, re­ and animal photography) are no less aggressive lation to visible reality than do other mimetic than work which makes a virtue of plainness objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit unforgettable photographs decade after decade, in every use of the camera. This is as evident in still want, first of all, to show something "out the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom first two decades, as in all the succeeding photographs are a handy, fast form of note-tak­ decades, during which technology made possible ing, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes an ever increasing spread of that mentality snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. which looks at the world as a set of potential 176 Part V • Image Technologies and the Emergence of Mass Society photographs. Even for such early masters as are cherished. Pho David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret family life just whe) Cameron who used the camera as a means of tries of Europe and getting painterly images, the point of taking of the family starts photographs was a vast departure from the aims As that c1austroph< of painters. From its start, photography implied was being carved ( the capture of the largest possible number of aggregate, photogr< subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. alize, to restate syn' The subsequent industrialization of camera tech­ tinuity and vanish nology only carried out a promise inherent in life. Those ghostly photography from its very beginning: to democ­ the token presence ratize all experiences by translating them into family's photograpl images. the extended famil) That age when taking photographs required mains of it. a cumbersome and expensive contraption-the As photograph: toy of 'the clever, the wealthy, and the ob­ possession of a past sessed-seems remote indeed from the era of people to take posse sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take are insecure.
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