Sur la photographie

I really enjoyed the first essay in this collection, "In Plato's Cave" was my favourite. In interrogating how we relate to photographs and photography, and how they in turn shape how we relate to the world, Sontag's thesis feels timeless. It's hard to imagine this was written nearly 50 years ago, as ot captures so much of what we live with today when smartphones have turned us all into photographers.

Moving forward in the book, I couldn't maintain the same enthusiasm. Sontag is writing for a particular audience. If you aren't familiar with major philosophical and artistic movements over the past century, you may need to have Wikipedia open to follow along. Not knowing anything about surrealism, parts of the text seem like a lot of name-dropping, and refutations of arguments that I haven't heard the other side of.

The author also has a habit of making a claim about a widely held belief, in order to then tear it down. This may have been more convincing in 1977. A half century later I found myself wondering was this really what people thought, or is this just a strawman?

Again, I highly recommend the first chapter. The rest feels like it had a time and an audience, and outside of that context its interest may be limited.

1) "In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are."

2) "Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive."

3) "The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects---to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. 'The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom to fascination,' Arbus noted. Photographing an appalling underworld (and a desolate, plastic overworld), she had no intention of entering into the horror experienced by the denizens of those worlds. They are to remain exotic, hence 'terrific.' Her view is always from the outside."

4) "Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois."

5) "Like other steadily aggrandizing enterprises, photography has inspired its leading practitioners with a need to explain, again and again, what they are doing and why it is valuable. The era in which photography was widely attacked (as parricidal with respect to painting, predatory with respect to people), was a brief one. [...] Nothing is more acceptable today than the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as an everyday activity and as a branch of high art. Yet something about photography still keeps the first-rate professionals defensive and hortatory: virtually every important photographer right up to the present has written manifestoes and credos expounding photography's moral and aesthetic mission. And photographers give the most contradictory accounts of what kind of knowledge they possess and what kind of art they practice."

6) "What talented photographers do cannot of course be characterized either as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. Photography is the paradigm of an inherently equivocal connection between self and world---its version of the ideology of realism sometimes dictating an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates the self. One side or the other of the connection is always being rediscovered and championed."

7) "Although photography generates works that can be called art---it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure---photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made."