'Sontag said that everything exists to end in a photograph. Today everything exists to be scrolled past in a feed.'
This year marks 50 years since Susan Sontag’s essay “Photography” was published in the New York Review of Books. Slightly edited and renamed In Plato’s Cave, it would become the first essay in her collectionThe breadth of “Photography” is immense.
Having taken a photograph, we think of its subject as our captive: it’s there now, on the film, in the camera’s memory. This can make us inept observers. There is no need to experience something now, as we can always review it later. So we grab and run. One way of approaching Sontag’s deeper point here is through her discussion of this Leica advertisement:
Like Kierkegaard, Sontag’s purpose was, broadly speaking, ethical. She was concerned with our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. She thought that photographs were displacing us. What is furthest in space and time now reaches us as quickly as what is closest. It is not that the far has drawn nearer, but that everything is held at an equal distance. Our sense of situatedness has been upset. We are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere – an all-seeing, incorporeal eye.
In a late interview, Sontag said that she was for “complexity and the respect for reality.” But what exactly does she mean by reality? “Photography” begins: Sontag was interested above all in enriching the sorts of stories that we tell ourselves and others. She was interested in “consciousness”, not in the narrow sense of the mind as opposed to body, but in the novelist’s sense of the narratives of embodied subjects. Understanding, for Sontag, is not a matter of taking things at face value, but a matter of interpretation. “Only that which narrates can make us understand,” she writes.
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