On Reading “On Photography”
Still preparing for an immersion in Documentary Studies, I next took up Susan Sontag’s 1973 manifesto, “On Photography.”
I use “manifesto” purposefully. Every page has challenging and provocative theses. I will focus here on the first chapter, “In Plato’s Cave.”
Its opening line: “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” (3)
I can see spending an entire class period unpacking that line.
And: “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)
And: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” (4)
And: “Photographs furnish evidence. . . . The picture may distort; but there is alays a presumpton that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.” (5)
But she offers an unsparing critique of photography. She speaks about the “aggression” of photography and the mentality “which looks at world as a set of potential photographs.” (7)
And “photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.” (8)
Like others, she observes a practice of “converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” (9)
She points our attention again to the aggression of photography and our shocking language for it, when we speak of “loading,” “aiming,” and “shooting” a photograph. (14)
She denies social power to the photograph. “A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude.” (17) That is, “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one — and can help build a nascent one.” (17)
But if a photograph meets a moral position, its effect can be powerful. In that case, she argues, photographs are more memorable than moving images, especially television with its “underselected images” (18). She says that the single 1972 photograph of the South Vietnamese child running, screaming, from napalm had more influence than hundreds of hours of television coverage of the Vietnam War.
And later: “Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.” (23)
She privileges narrative. “Only that which narrates can make us understand. The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge.” (23–24) But what then would she make of the photographic slide show? Almost every line makes one want to engage her in conversation.
And: “The ethical content of photographs is fragile.” (21) It will be eroded by time. A photograph from 1900 that affected the people then will be interesting to us because it is from the 1900s. “Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.” (21)
And the final lines of the first chapter call forth our “selfie,” Instagram culture: “Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.” (24) She recalls that Mallarme said everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” (24)
