On Photography by Susan Sontag
I don't like being photographed. It's not because I'm not photogenic, which I 'm not. It just make me feel ... not real, not authentic. However, I do let others, usually family and friends, take my picture. I do it for them and I smile knowing that with this photograph they want to include me in their memories. It's a good feeling.
Although, I don't like being photographed, I like taking photographs. Especially of places. I like to discover interesting aspects , the rhythm of life in a place, and I want the picture to show how I experience this place. Most of my pictures are average, but sometimes I take really good pictures. As usual, when I take an interest in something, I turn to books. I read a few articles about photography and finally, Susan Sontag's superb essays On Photography. In the six essays included in the book, Susan Sontag explores the cultural, literary, historical and philosophical background of photography. Photography, she argues, turn a moment into an event, that is worth photographing, but photography is also ideology because a photograph can be seen as a way of looking at things in everyday society.
Sontag describes how people become images, how the individual is subsumed into the representation of the individual, and how the image and the representation come to be preferred over the person they represent. "How plausible", she writes, "it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between the photograph and a life, to choose the photograph."
I thought a lot about it. A photograph is supposed to depict a particular moment in time, a real moment in time. But, at the same time, it is not real. Could that be that a photographer prefers the photograph to life because she does not like this particular reality? Or maybe because of the feelings that a photograph evokes, as "an inventory of mortality"? I don't know, this is just chattering in head.
Sontag's essays On Photography are teeming with insight but I find it difficult to keep them straight in my mind. William Cass, reviewing the book in the New York Times, when it came out in 1977, provides an explanation. "Sontag's ideas are grouped more nearly like a gang ok keys upon a ring than a run of onions on a string." It is an excellent description; it explains the loose, accumulative and epigrammatic structure of the book. Nonetheless, I am awed with Sontag's aesthetics and erudition and her ideas about death and the photograph as memento mori. It changed the way I am thinking about photography.
An abstract from Susan Sontag's essay In Plato's Cave.
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 from of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and f celebration of the body of the world- all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure of taking photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It wouldn't 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 come more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. ...... Today everything exist to end in a photograph. __Susan Sontag, I Plato's Cave.
"A photo could also be described as a quotation, making a book of photographs like a book of quotations." __Susan Sontag
The book ends with and appendix of quotes. "It is an appropriate conclusion for a book whose very quotability fueled controversy, since quotes, like photographs, can be extracted and assembled, doctored and framed and plucked from their from their proper context, to support almost any argument," writes Benjamin Moser in his wonderful biography of Susan Sontag.