(A critical discussion of:)

On Photography,

by Susan Sontag, A biography)

The book is a collection of essays that Sontag wrote for The New York Review of Books. We summarize it, and comment.

In a first essay, Sontag draws an anology between our viewing of photographs and the people in Plato's cave, who view shadows of statues, projected onto the wall of a cave. (Sontag does not mention that these people need to be violently dragged out into the light before they identify the objects of which they saw only the shadows (images).) The multitude of available images leads us to construct the whole world in our head. Not only is photography massively reproduced, it also has become a mass art, a social rite, in which we document sequences of consumption. We certify our experiences through taking photographs. Yet, photographs are a token of absence, altough specific, historic and immediate. The world they portray is not one of understanding or knowledge, but one of aesthetic consumerism.

In "America seen through photographs, darkly", Sontag argues that the cultural revolution, proclaiming everything to be art, has come in an unexpected form, through photography. From an interest in everything, American photography has shifted towards an uncompassionate focus on the freakishness of America, the grave of the Occident. The bourgeois flaneur has witnessed and participated in a surrealist takeover of modern sensibility by the inhumane. (Main example: Arbus.)

In a third essay, Sontag argues that European photography has concentrated on the picturesque, the important, the beautiful, in contrast to American photography which has treated the odd, the poor and the vast. No overview is reached in American photography since no overview over the country is possible. Photography in general consists of quotations, found objects: the photographer is the collector of everything real (but does not reach understanding).

In "The Heroism of Vision", the author claims that photographic seeing is dissociative, allienates, and replaces the real by the photographic. Moreover, the heroism of vision is, due to the wide spread of cameras, accessible to all. (Captions cannot save the truth of reality from its photographic translation.)

"Photographic Evangels" treats the self-contradictory statements that photographers make about their activity. Some insist they make, others that they take photographs, some self-express, others self-efface, some claim to be passive, others to be aggressive photographers. Sontag also notes that photography has properties in common with fine art, but perhaps even more so with trade, science, and a practical art. As a fine art, photography has not lead to a canon of work, but to a continuous update of a stream of images (which one may find in museums). Reasons for this continuity are found in the less distinct signature of photographers, and in the criteria for good photography which do not include authenticity and craftsmanship, but rather innovativeness and presence, which can be obtained by an amateur on a lucky day. Photography rather than an art, is a medium, a meta-art.

In the last essay, "The Image-World" Sontag revisits the parabel of Plato's cave. In modern society, reality is images. Photographs form a secular magic world, narcissistic, depersonalized, in which aesthetic, and instrumental note-taking of the interesting, has become the norm. She advocates an ecology not only of the real, but of images as well.

Summary and final comments: Sontag's collection of essays is an interesting reflection on standard main-stream conceptions of photography. The author muses on photography in quite generic terms, mixing up very different uses and aspects of photography. The most interesting conclusion that she draws is that photography should first of all be seen as a medium. (She draws wrong conclusions as well, for instance when she suggests that photography would not require craftsmanship. In fact, that's a main-stream misconception on photography, as a closer technical look, and some acquaintance with high quality photographic art would rapidly reveal.) In short, these are very interesting essays from the New York Review of Books, as they were originally intended.

"On Photogaphy", Susan Sontag, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

Copyright 2005 by Jan Troost