Images of the World

OURS IS A WORLD dominated by photography and by cameras. Photography has fascinated the Western public since its invention in 1839, and that fascination is growing. The camera is more accessible--financially and technologically--to more people than ever before. In the last two decades, photography has become fully accepted as a legitimate art form, and photo galleries and books continue to emerge at an unprecedented rate.

It is precisely this photographic dominance of the world that bothers Susan Sontag and against which she reacts in On Photography. She asks pointed questions about the nature of photography and its effects on culture and society--aesthetic questions, moral questions, political questions, philosophical questions. She alludes to the parable of Plato's cave and the way in which people experience the world through images rather than reality--"humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still revelling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth"--and argues that the nature of photographic images fundamentally changes the perception and experience of reality, changes the cave itself.

Sontag explores the way in which photography affects one's experience of the world, of other people, of oneself. By certifying and documenting photographs become more important than the actual experience, enduring after the experience itself has passed. The world becomes something to be photographed, something to "shoot," something to put down on paper and look at later. Photographs are the standard by which the world is judged. Sontag describes the disappointment of tourists who find the sights on their vacations less exciting than photographs had led them to expect.

For Sontag, photography rests on uncertain aesthetic premises; it contains a fundamental "confusion about truth and beauty." Some photographers, like Weston, exalt photography as a better way of seeing, while others, like Robert Frank, see it as a chance to offer a view of life as it really is, to offer, quite literally, a slice of life. Photography remains in a kind of limbo--unable to oin with painting in transcending subject to pass into total abstraction, unable to share the capacity of films and novels to capture life's motion.

PHOTOGRAPHY IS at once the most seductive and deceptive of art forms, in Sontag's view. Its seductiveness lies in the apparent proximity of photographic visions to life itself. Its deception lies in the fact that the proximity is only apparent. The photographic vision depicts a reality very different from life's reality. Time is frozen in a photograph; continuous in life. The experience of photography involves only one sense; the experience of life involves all. Such differences between photographic reality and actual reality lead Sontag to conclude that "surrealism is at the heart of the photographic enterprise"--not in the sense of the glib, self-conscious surrealism of one branch of photography, but in the very activity of presenting a reality of a very different order from conventional reality, a reality apprehended through a different scheme of time and sense. Sontag finds it ironic and erroneous that this most surreal of all media has claimed to be, and has been embraced as, the most realistic.

Perhaps Sontag's greatest insight concerns the relationship of a photograph to its own context. She comments, "as Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use--so for each photograph." She focuses attention on this use, to the immediate use--whether in a gallery or a newspaper, whether captioned or not--and to the societal use, to the time, place, and culture depicted in the photograph. She explores the different perspectives on photography held by people in the Fifties and the Seventies, explores the different reactions to photography in China and the United States. And she concludes that photography is especially well suited for the most advanced capitalist societies because it is "the ideal arm of consciousness in the acquisitive mode," part of "the logic of consumption" that reigns in such societies.

Sontag's arguments are eloquent and stimulating, posing necessary questions about the meaning and effect of the photography boom. But there is also a disturbing sense in which Sontag is unfair to photography, a sense in which she sounds very much the New York intellectual ready to reject photography for being too popular. In a passage dripping with arrogance and elitism, she writes:

Photography has become almost as widely practised an amusement as sex and dancing--which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practised by most people as an art. It is merely a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

But mass art forms are not inherently inferior. In fact, mass appeal may well be a quality that should be praised and sought after rather than scoffed at. Photography represents more than an extension of acquisitive consciousness; it also represents an extension of aesthetic consciousness. Every picture taken involves choice, selection, discrimination between unlimited possibilities, a heightened sense of what one appreciates and wishes to reproduce--such is the essence of aesthetic experience, and its extension should be applauded.

NOT ONLY does it bother Sontag that everybody takes pictures, it also bothers her that anything, anybody, can seem to have importance when photographed. "To photograph is to confer importance," she writes. But there is a different formulation of the relationship of photography to importance, a formulation that Sontag herself mentions at one point--namely, that photography does not confer importance, only discovers and communicates it. Between the two concepts lies a world of difference. If photography confers importance, this implies an importance inherent in the camera, rather than in the subject. It implies an already existing, hierarchical notion of what is and is not important. But if photography only discovers importance, this makes photography what William Stott has called it--"a radically democratic genre," a genre that discovers meaning and mystery in the apparently unimportant. As such, photography again deserves applause.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is the sense in which Sontag seems to resent photography because it is a non-verbal, non-intellectual process. She argues repeatedly that the photographic experience is a surface experience that cannot convey real knowledge, cannot convey real understanding. She objects to the way in which "the photographer's approach. . . is unsystematic, indeed anti-systematic." And well it may be, but systematic thinking and intellectual rigor is but one form of truth. Photography--with its episodic glimpses, its focus on a single image in a world that is blurred and rushing past--presents another form of truth, different from rational truth but also valid.

The two forms are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they can complement one another quite nicely. Roy Stryker, the man who directed the Farm Security Administration photography project discovered as an economics professor at Columbia the effectiveness of photographs in making abstract economic concepts tangible for his students. In clear contrast to Sontag, he became convinced that "the photograph... that little rectangle, is one of the damnedest educational devices ever made." Sontag correctly argues that "photographs do not explain; they acknowledge." But this is no reason to disparage photography--understanding is impossible without acknowledgement.

Sontag's arrogance towards photography as a non-systematic, non-verbal mode of communication is uncalled for. Hers is, however, the world of words, and if she seems overly elitist at times, perhaps it is because she is such a master of her world. On Photography is elegantly written, thought-provoking, the kind of book that makes you impulsively write in its margins, and undoubtedly one of the most significant pieces of photographic criticism yet written.