Photo

Ryan W

Word count

(824)

  "Photo"

In “On Photography,” Susan Sontag maps out chronological events in photography from the early 1900s to today.  She discusses the different uses of photography and photographic images and how they’ve changed over time.  Sontag introduces the subject by saying “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality than anyone can make or acquire” (4).  Photographs are history; they’re records, hard evidence that show a glimpse of something or someone at the moment in time in which the photograph was taken.

 

Sontag notes that often we see photographs as proof of something we’ve heard but haven’t quite believed.  She challenges the idea a photo represents truth when she talks about photographers such as Dorothea Lange taking dozens of pictures of a subject “until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film” (6).  She says photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings or drawings.

 

 

Over time, photography has gone from something that required patience, time and money to something used by almost everyone.  Sontag states that family households with children are twice as likely to have a camera; “not to take pictures of one’s children…is a sign of parental indifference” (8). 

 

Sontag says that “most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter.”  I feel that the other side of the story would be that taking a photograph may lessen the moment at the time, such as if you’re making people pose – but if you’re taking a picture of an object you can capture the image in less a second and you can still appreciate the object after you’ve taken the picture.  One might feel that taking an action shot of a animal or a similar situation takes away from the moment, but taking a photograph can help keep your mind from distorting the image from what you wanted to see to what you did see.  A photograph can also make that moment immortal because you always have that picture; you can keep it in an album with all of your memories (or “slices of time” as Sontag calls them), and you can show all your friends.  A good example of this is National Geographic – the  photographs in this magazine share and make tangible moments that readers would otherwise never know had existed. 

 

Sontag goes on to quote Diane Arbus, a photogragher who stated that she always thought of photography as “taboo”, and that’s why she liked it.  Sontag responds that “using a camera is not a very good way of getting at someone sexually” because “there has to be distance” between the photographer and the subject (13).  On a blind date, you don’t start taking pictures of the person you’re seeing;  you want to be close and sensual to that person, not distance yourself from them.

 

On page 7 Sontag introduces a theme that runs throughout her paper; “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”  On page 14 she talks further about how people can get “trigger happy”, so to speak.  She makes a comparison between a camera and a gun, and says that the “camera is sold as a predatory weapon.”  I think an example of this would be the paparazzi, skewing the truth by taking hundreds of pictures and usually picking the most controversial.  Sontag continues “…there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture.  To photograph people is to violate them… it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed” (14).  I’ve heard that some cultures believe that photographing a person is to steal a part of that person’s soul. 

 

I do not think of this as true but our culture is a little more caught up in a picture-frenzy than some.  Taking lots of photographs helps establish social networking and identify oneself with others; examples of this might be facebook and myspace.  People sometimes put erotic, almost pornographic pictures of themselves on these sites.  This is another example of a camera being used like a weapon, but in this case people are choosing to hurt themselves with it.

 

Sontag  discusses how photographs taken in war can provoke “moral outrage” and cause political action.  But the more violent or pornographic images we see, the less shocking they become and the more it becomes okay.  This can numb our society and actually prevent action. 

 

Sontag concludes this paper with the idea that “photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it.  But this is the opposite of understanding…” (23).  Sontag argues that true understanding only comes through questioning something, not just accepting what it looks like on the surface.  She leaves us with the idea that our culture is made of “image-junkies” – “having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it” (24).