Those powers, those presences were present in them. The limits placed on photography in China only reflect the character of their society, a society unified by an ideology of stark, unremitting conflict. On the contrary, in the new age of unbelief the allegiance to images was strengthened. Our unlimited use of photographic images not only reflects but gives shape to our own society, one unified by the denial of conflict. Images of real things are interlayered with images of images. In China, where no space is left over from politics and moralism for expressions of aesthetic sensibility, only some things are to be photographed and only in certain ways. Their ubiquitous activities amount to the most radical, and the safest, version of mobility. But what photography supplies is not only a record of the past but a new way of dealing with the present, as the effects of the countless billions of contemporary photograph-documents attest. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and one of the most influential critics of her generation. In Jude the Obscure, Jude’s discovery that Arabella has sold the maple frame with the photograph of himself in it which he gave her on their wedding day signifies “the utter death of every sentiment in his wife” and is “the conclusive little stroke to demolish all sentiment in him.”. It’s probably a source of bemusement for some that Susan Sontag’s venerable 1977 book On Photography still serves as an entry point into the nebulous world of photographic theory for a great many readers. Photography for us is a double-edged instrument for producing clichés (the French word that means both trite expression and photographic negative) and for serving up “fresh” views. ... May 26, 1977). As the taking of photographs seems almost obligatory to those who travel about, the passionate collecting of them has special appeal for those confined—either by choice, incapacity, or coercion—to enclosed, indoor space. 8 (February 22, 1974), which supplies abridged versions of three other articles in the Peking press. Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles it—a key procedure of a modern society. Through being photographed, something becomes part of a system of information, fitted into schemes of classification and storage which range from the crudely chronological order of snapshot-sequences pasted in family albums to the dogged accumulations and meticulous filing needed for photography’s uses in weather reporting, astronomy, microbiology, geology, police work, medical training and diagnosis, military reconnaissance, and art history. The credence that could no longer be given to realities understood in the form of images was now being given to realities understood to be images, illusions. Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing. The other treats everything as the object of some present or future use, as matter for estimates, decisions, and predictions. Melville’s intuition in Pierre is that all forms of portraiture in the business civilization are compromised; at least, so it appears to his hero, a paragon of alienated sensibility. And it is the characteristic visual taste of those at the first stage of camera culture, when the image is defined as something that can be stolen from its owner; thus Antonioni was reproached for “forcibly taking shots against people’s wishes,” like “a thief.” Possession of a camera does not license intrusion, as it does in this society whether people like it or not. READ AN EXCERPT. It begins with the famous "In Plato's Cave"essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching "Brief Anthology of Quotations." A personal response to the Khmer Rouge Genocide of 1975-1979, Unfinished Stories of Cambodia. The future may offer another kind of dictatorship, whose master idea is “the interesting,” in which images of all sorts, stereotyped and eccentric, proliferate. Falmouth MA Photography. Our very notion of the world—the capitalist twentieth century’s “one world”—is like a photographic overview. “They watch over my little routines,” writes Genet—conflating reverie, masturbation, and writing—and “are all the family I have and my only friends.” For stay-at-homes, prisoners, and the self-imprisoned, to live among the photographs of glamorous strangers is a sentimental response to isolation and an insolent challenge to it. Ballard’s novel Crash (1973) describes a more specialized collecting of photographs in the service of sexual obsession: photographs of car accidents which the character called Vaughan collects while preparing to stage his own death in a car crash. The photographic exploration and duplication of the world fragments continuities and feeds the pieces into an interminable dossier, thereby providing possibilities of control that could not even be dreamed of under the earlier system of recording information: writing. “It was real…”—since the procedure of photography is a materializing, so to speak, of what is most original in his procedure as a novelist. The response may, of course, be either repressive or benevolent: military reconnaissance photographs help snuff out lives, X-rays help save them. December 18, 1977 A Different Kind of Art By WILLIAM H. GASS. But this is not because a photograph cannot evoke memories (it can, depending on the quality of the viewer rather than of the photograph) but because of what Proust makes clear about his own demands upon imaginative recall, that it be not just extensive and accurate but give the texture and essence of things. But the force of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality—for turning it into a shadow. In the form of photographic images, things and events are put to new uses, assigned new meanings, which go beyond the distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the useful and the useless, good taste and bad. And even the very wealthy usually owned just one portrait of themselves or any of their forebears as children, that is, an image of one moment of childhood, whereas the camera offers the possibility of possessing a complete record, at all ages. Besides, when every body has his portrait, true distinction lies in not having yours published at all. But the results of this practice of instant access are another way of creating distance. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. The whole of a life may be summed up in a momentary appearance.1 And a change in appearances is a change in the person, for he refused to posit any “real” person ensconced behind these appearances. The movie operation precludes not only this modest participation but whatever is active in spectatorship. On Photography Hardcover – 1 November 1977 by Susan Sontag (Author) 4.5 out of 5 stars 214 ratings Few other activities prepare us so well to live with these contradictory attitudes as picture-taking does, which lends itself so brilliantly to both. First of all, she says that photographing is “essentially an act of non-intervention” that engenders a kind of detached, abstract, distanced relationship with the world (Sontag 1977:11). While many people in nonindustrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken—feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs. ↩, All these perceptions are of course part of China’s great history, which includes a long tradition of painting and of poetry that celebrates the eccentric over the narrowly typical, fantasy over literalism, the indirect over the direct. Given this purpose, it was as unnecessary for the tens of millions mobilized in meetings held in schools, factories, army units, and communes around the country to “Criticize Antonioni’s Anti-China Film” to have actually seen Chung Kuo as it was for the participants in the “Criticize Lin Piao and Confucius” campaign of 1976 to have read a text of Confucius. Like a pair of binoculars with no “right” or “wrong” end, the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle. And his premonitory complaint has been transformed in the twentieth century into a widely agreed on diagnosis: that a society becomes “modern” when one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images, when images that have extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality, and are themselves coveted substitutes for firsthand experience, become indispensable to the health of the economy, the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness. On Photography by Susan Sontag (1977-05-03) by Susan Sontag A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. In the form of a photograph the explosion of an A-bomb can be used to advertise a safe. Indeed, the importance of photographic images as the medium through which more and more events enter our experience is, finally, only a by-product of their effectiveness in furnishing knowledge dissociated from and independent of experience. The photographic recycling makes clichés out of unique objects, distinctive and vivid artifacts out of clichés. In 1977 Susan Sontag published, under the title On Photography, a compilation of texts written from 1971 to 1977 for the legendary magazine The New York Review of Books.. Balzac’s method was to magnify tiny details, as in a photographic enlargement, to juxtapose incongruous traits or items as in a photographic layout: made expressive in this way, any one thing can be connected with everything else. Nothing could be more instructive about the meaning of photography for us—as, among other things, a method of hyping up the real—than the attacks on Antonioni’s film in the Chinese press in early 1974. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. ... Susan Sontag. For example, now all adults can know exactly how they and their parents and grandparents looked as children—a knowledge not available to anyone before the invention of cameras, not even to that tiny minority among whom it was customary to commission paintings of their children. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross. Many people possess pictures of their families tacked to the wall or stuck under the glass on top of the dresser or office desk. But with bad intentions Antonioni, instead of showing this reality, took shots only of people’s clothing, movement, and expressions; here, someone’s ruffled hair; there, people peering, their eyes dazzled by the sun; one moment, their sleeves; another, their trousers…. Sontag’s 1977 collection of essays entitled On Photography is perhaps the most prescient and influential book ever written on the medium. Susan Sontag from On Photography. On the one hand, cameras arm vision in the service of power—of the state, of industry, of science. Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and one of the most influential critics of her generation. This Issue. In 1850, Delacroix noted in his Journal the success of some “experiments in photography” being made at Cambridge, where astronomers were photographing the sun and the moon and had managed to obtain a pinhead-size impression of the star Alpha. A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. considered with what infinite readiness now, the most faithful portrait of any one could be taken by the Daguerreotype, whereas in former times a faithful portrait was only within the power of the moneyed, or mental aristocrats of the earth. The feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt. For Balzac, the spirit of an entire milieu could be disclosed by a single detail, however paltry or arbitrary-seeming. (This is the last article in a series on photography.) When she is there the spectacle is complete.” ↩, See A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks—A Criticism of Antonioni’s Anti-China Film “China” (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1974), an eighteen-page pamphlet (unsigned) which reproduces an article that appeared in the paper Renminh Ribao on January 30, 1974; and “Repudiating Antonioni’s Anti-China Film,” Peking Review, No. On Photography. Lei Feng Exhibitions organized in the large cities included “photographic documents, such as ‘Lei Feng helping an old woman to cross the street,’ ‘Lei Feng secretly [sic] doing his comrade’s washing,’ ‘Lei Feng giving his lunch to a comrade who forgot his lunch box,’ and so forth,” with, apparently, nobody questioning “the providential presence of a photographer during the various incidents in the life of that humble, hitherto unknown soldier” (New York Review, May 26, 1977). That photographic recording is always, potentially, a means of control was already recognized when such powers were in their infancy. But the currently popular uses of image-feedback in the bedroom, the therapy session, and the weekend conference seem far less momentous than video’s potential as a tool for surveillance in public places. In the operating room, I am the one who changes focus, who makes the close-ups and the medium shots. It originally appeared as a … Our inclination to treat character as equivalent to behavior makes more acceptable a widespread public installation of the mechanized regard from the outside provided by cameras. The Chinese circumscribe the uses of photography so that images reinforce and reiterate each other.4 We make of photography a means by which, precisely, anything can be said, any purpose served. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). Someone who “deliberately stalked people who were unaware of his intention to film them” was depriving people and things of their right to pose, in order to look their best. Susan Sontag’s On Photography is a text that every photography theory student grapples with at one point or another. The current Chinese ideology defines reality as a historical process structured by recurrent dualisms with clearly outlined, morally colored meanings; the past, for the most part, is simply judged as “bad.” For us, there are historical processes with awesomely complex and sometimes contradictory meanings; and arts which draw much of their value from our consciousness of time as history, like photography. Cameras establish an inferential relation to the present (reality is known by its traces), provide an instantly retroactive view of experience. Besides the mass-produced photographic iconography of revered leaders, revolutionary kitsch, and cultural treasures, one often sees photographs of a private sort in China. And if photography could also be said to restore the most primitive relationship—the partial identity of image and object—the potency of the image is now experienced in a very different way. (And the aestheticizing of reality that makes everything, anything, available to the camera is what also permits the co-opting of any photograph, even one of an utterly practical sort, as art.) Copied the wikipedia definition of the book. First published in 1977, it brings together a series of nonfiction pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. There seems no way (short of undergoing a vast historical amnesia, as in China) of limiting the proliferation of photographic images. Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. In China what is defined as an issue for debate is one about which there are “two lines,” a right one and a wrong one. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Most contemporary expressions of concern that an image-world is replacing the real one continue to echo, as Feuerbach did, the Platonic depreciation of the image: true in so far as it resembles something real, sham because it is no more than a resemblance. The short-statured woman’s blowsy embonpoint is the product of the life here, as typhoid is the consequence of the exhalations of a hospital. The fear that a subject’s uniqueness was leveled by being photographed was never so frequently expressed as in the 1850s, the years when portrait photography gave the first example of how cameras could create instant fashions and durable industries. Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to “fix” the fleeting moment. Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.. One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as "a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." News about upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, and more. In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it. It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it. War and photography now seem inseparable, and plane crashes and other horrific accidents always attract people with cameras. Photographs in China are not intended to convey complex meaning or to be very interesting in themselves, or to show the world from an unusual angle, or to reveal new subjects. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. Photography is acquisition in several forms. Clichés, recycled, become metaclichés. In a hospital in Shanghai in 1973, watching a factory worker with advanced ulcers have nine-tenths of his stomach removed under acupuncture anaesthesia, I managed to follow the three-hour procedure (the first operation I’d ever observed) without queasiness, never once feeling the need to look away. One is vulnerable to disturbing events in the form of photographic images in a way that one is not to the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. To Hofrat Behrens, in The Magic Mountain, the pulmonary X-rays of his patients are diagnostic tools. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images. To consume means to burn, to use up—and, therefore, to need to be replenished. The strategy of Proust’s realism presumes distance from what is normally experienced as real, the present, in order to reanimate what is usually available only in a remote and shadowy form, the past—which is where the present becomes in his sense real, that is, something that can be possessed. It begins with the famous " In Plato' s Cave" essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching " Brief Anthology of Quotations." 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