Susan Sontag Deep Dive p.2
Continued from a few months ago - I finally finished all of the essays from On Photography this weekend. I’ve pulled out some morsels I’ve been savoring, as I think about the start of my next phase of Photo Sobriety, a project I’ve been mulling over since the fall, taking small stints of time taking no photos or screenshots in an attempt to be more present, relate to the act of looking differently, and ultimately alter my relationship with the act of making photographs. I’m planning to kick off a longer phase next week and have been reading diligently to help inform my approach, serving as motivation and reconnecting to the purpose of the project as it daunts, hanging in the hear future.
In Plato’s Cave
Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed
When we are afraid, we shoot. When we are nostalgic, we take pictures.
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs - especially those of people , of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past - are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate.
Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.
It would not 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 comes more and more equivalent to looking at it in photographed form.
America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly
To photograph is to confer importance.
In the open fields of American experience, as catalogued with passion by Whitman and as sized p with a shrug by Warhol, everybody is a celebrity. No moment is more important than any other moment; no person is more interesting than any other person.
[Walker] Evans wanted his photographs to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent." The moral universe of the 1930s no longer ours, these adjectives are barely credible today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it would be authoritative. Nobody understands, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.
Photographic Evangels
Picture-taking has been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a lucid and precise act of knowing, of conscious intelligence, or as a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter.
In this century, the older generation of photographers described photography as a heroic effort of attention, an ascetic discipline, a mystic receptivity to the world which requires that the photographer pass through a cloud of unknowing.
Photography is advanced as a form of knowing without knowing: a way of outwitting the world, instead of making a frontal attack on it.
Whatever the camera records is a disclosure - whether it is imperceptible, fleeting parts of movement, an order that natural vision is incapable of perceiving or a “heightened reality” (Moholy-Nagy’s phrase), or simply an elliptical way of seeing.
Just to show something, anything, in the photographic view, is to show that it is hidden.
To claim that photography must be realistic is not incompatible with opening up an even wider gap between image and reality, in which the mysteriously acquired knowledge (and the enhancement of reality) supplied by photographs presumes a prior alienation from or devaluation of reality.
The Image World
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images - as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.
While Proustian labors presuppose that reality is distant, photography implies instant access to the real. But the results of this practice of instant access are another way of creating distance. To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to reexperience the unreality ad remoteness of the real.
Photography, which has so many narcisitic uses, is also a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the work; and the two uses are complementary.
The feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt. Partly it is because one is "here" not "there" and partly it is the character of inevitability that all events acquire when they are transmuted into images. in the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.
The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up and therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first becomes the possibilities of photography are infinite and sound, because the project is finally self-devouring.
Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.