On Photography

"Sontag’s lesson is that being photographed gives us a sense of both being real and also of existing. The rise of the selfie is eloquent testimony to how people continue to see themselves and how personal histories are now constructed first and foremost through the authority of the image. There’s a kind of strange moment where a memory is difficult to confirm or corroborate if there isn’t an image to attest to the fact that you were here or there or with this or that person on a given time and day—this speaks volumes about the popularity of social media sites such as Instagram, which are driven by images. Sontag had such a prescient way of looking at the powers of photography when On Photography came out in 1977. That’s now forty years ago! The preference for the photo to the real thing is something that we find now perhaps more than ever. People don’t tell you stories as often as they used to: instead they’ll take out their phone and show you a photograph of the experience. Sometimes that’s a peculiar phenomenon because the image then is able to determine the story that the person tells. There are all sorts of incidental details—such as the length of a hem, the color of the sky, the pattern on a tea set, or the make of a car—that we don’t necessarily remember about lived experiences because they pass us by. But in a photograph, we can see and, therefore, remember oh so and so was there, was wearing that necklace, came with that man, ate too much cake, etc . “People don’t tell you stories as often as they used to, instead they’ll take out their phone and show you a photograph of the experience” Sontag and Barthes’ generation thought about photography as a kind of new media. I am simplifying a bit here since photography itself was more than 100 years old by then. But thinking critically about it as art, as a medium with its own specificities wasn’t fully articulated, at least not in the way it has been so thoroughly theorized today. Writing philosophically about photography and the power of that specific medium was still exploratory when they were writing in the 1970s and 1980s. This experimental critical spirit reminds me of things that artists in earlier periods were trying to do in their own work as well with the media that they had at their disposal. They obviously could not have foreseen the eventuality of photography, but for someone like the sixteenth-century painter Sofonisba Anguissola, every self-portrait was in a sense a kind of desire to capture and preserve that instance, that lived moment of her life, as an image. Obviously not through the same technological means as a photograph but the underlying philosophical or existential desire was there. Moreover, even though Sontag’s and Barthes’ writings focus on photography, they have the potential to help us think differently about the concerns—philosophical, existential, and otherwise—that artists from a different era, working in a different medium might have confronted in their own practices of image-making. Sontag is also just such a beautiful writer. I read On Photography as a freshman in college, and it has remained a great inspiration in my own work."

"One thing Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael have in common is that they take the culture of everyday life and instead of just letting it pass unnoticed – like part of the furniture of our ordinary experience – they ask about its significance. And like Boorstin, Sontag sees things coming. For example, she was the first to make the claim, which at the time was very controversial, that photography is misleading and seductive because it looks like reality but is in fact highly selective. It’s easy to see that painting represents the artist’s point of view but a photograph looks like real life. In fact, it embodies art and choice no less than a painting, in capturing what the photographer chooses to capture. “They take the culture of everyday life and instead of just letting it pass unnoticed – like part of the furniture of our ordinary experience – they ask about its significance.” Of course, this is even truer today than when Sontag wrote, as photographers – and even ordinary people creating family albums – have at their disposal digital technology that can make significant alterations while seeming utterly real. Teenagers leafing through fashion magazines expect skin to be without pores or blemishes, lines are erased from the faces of movie stars, cellulite doesn’t exist on the bodies of models. Sontag lived long enough to see the emergence of digital technology but not to see how it has taken over photography — and turned it into a far more deceptive art than even she predicted. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Another provocative and prescient idea Sontag had in this book is the way in which taking a picture is predatory. By this she means that instead of living reality, we try to capture it. When we see something shocking or beautiful, our first impulse is to get out the camera. And today, of course, we have people who make careers of doing this, and some would describe them in exactly Sontag’s terms – predators. Sontag doesn’t write about tabloid culture but she gives us the ideas that help us to understand it. And Pinterest, for that matter!"