For the last few months I’ve been slowly parsing through Sontag’s On Photography essays. Slowly parsing because every sentence feels so packed with profundity and my brain goes spinning on off on tangents and I invent new projects for myself and then I refocus and get my mind blown again. Hits after hits.
I thought I’d document some lines or parcels that have really resonated. Organized by essay - I will follow up with additional essays as I finish them.
Melancholy Objects
Unlike the fine-art objects of pre-democratic eras, photographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist. Rather, they owe their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between the photographer and subject - mediated by the ever simpler and more automated machine, which is tireless, and which even when capricious can produce a result that is interesting and never entirely wrong.
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of objects - making it possible, as Benjamin said, to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
The contingency of photographs confirms that everything is perishable, the arbitrariness of photographic evidence indicates that reality is fundamentally unclassifiable. Reality is summed up in an array of casual fragments - an endlessly alluring, poignantly reductive way of dealing with the world.
Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.
The Heroism of Vision
A fake painting (one whose attribution is false) falsifies the history of art. A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality.
The history of photograph could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism.
Photographs do not simply render reality - realistically. It is reality which is scrutinized, and evaluated, for its fidelity to photographs.
What is beautiful became just what the eye can’t (or doesn’t) see: that fracturing, dislocating vision that only the camera supplies.
Photography is commonly regarded as an instrument for knowing things. When Thoreau said, “You can’t say more than you see,” he took for granted that sight had pride of place among senses. But when, several generations later, Thoreau’s dictum is quoted by Paul Strand to praise photography, it resonates with a different meaning. Cameras did not simply make it possible to apprehend more by seeing (through microphotography and teledetections). They changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing’s sake.
Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant detail, addicted to incongruity. But photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision.
As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions. Photography’s realism creates a confusion about the real which is (in the long run) analgesic morally as well as (both in the long and in the short run (sensorially stimulating. Hence, it clears our eyes. This is the fresh vision everyone has been talking about.
The urge to take photographs is in principle an indiscriminate one, for the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera. But this quality of being made interesting, like that of manifesting humanity, is an empty one.
In humanist jargon, the highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man. But photographs do not explain; they acknowledge.
If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious.
The force of the photograph is that it keeps open to the scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces.
Emphasis mine.