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    On Photography
    On Photography
    On Photography
    Ebook208 pages3 hours

    On Photography

    By Susan Sontag

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    • Photography

    • Evolution of Photography

    • Love Triangle

    • Hero's Journey

    • Outsider

    • Search for Meaning

    • Loss of Innocence

    • Passage of Time

    • Artist's Struggle

    • Collector

    • Flâneur

    • Double-Edged Sword

    About this ebook

    Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.

    One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag's On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as "a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." 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."

    Editor's Note

    A classic…

    Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” revolutionized the space of art criticism. Her virtuosic essays on the art of photography are works of art themselves; her philosophical writings elevated both the art of photography and the work of being a photographer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2011
    ISBN9781429957113
    On Photography
    Author

    Susan Sontag

    Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, including The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and nine works of essays, among them On Photography, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award for criticism. In 2001, Sontag was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. She died in New York City in 2004.

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    Reviews for On Photography

    4/5

    408 ratings22 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      An intellectual tour de force that discusses photography and much more. Probably the most concise, dense, and thoughtful book I have read.
    • 5/5
      On the art of photography and how photography has changed our lives (for better or worse). Many, many great insights and ideas throughout. Definitely recommended.
    • 4/5
      Well, I'll never look at photographs the same way again. In these essays, Sontag gives a wide-ranging overview of what photography and the photographic image means and has meant (as of 1977) since daguerreotypes were introduced. One can only imagine what she would have thought of the proliferation of images on the internet and of cellphones cameras. Probably much the same as in these pieces.
    • 5/5
      I read this when I was 17 or 18 and it changed the way I looked at photography and art. I was just entering college as a photography major so it had a big influence on me.
    • 4/5
      TL;DR photography is cool.

      Also, it makes me want Sontag's hot takes on the rise of cell phone photography.
    • 4/5
      Chapters 1 and 6 were exceptional, the others were good to mediocre. Overall, a wonderful thought-provoking look at how photography fits into western civilization, at least as of the mid 1970s.
    • 4/5
      Solid stuff, albeit hopping around all over the place.

      Like a lot of Sontag, I'm not really equipped to judge many of their cultural references; she's so rooted in the '60s-'70s NYC and European art scene that's dissipated since, with the influences and artists falling back into obscurity. But her insights on the ideological uses of photography are as brilliant as ever, especially given how ever more widespread it is when everyone has a camera in their pocket. It was originally a series of essays in the NYRB, though, and the seams show.
    • 2/5
      I started this book with a fair amount of expectation, and this is possibly the mistake I made. The book does have a reputation to uphold and this is what made me buy the book.

      It is a useful book, in that it is one written about photography by someone who is not, in my view, a photographer. So, to that extent, she does have an outsider's perspective and this is good. The book started off well, and her comments on some of the early masters are pertinent. Then, someway about a third into the book, I thought that she started to ramble, and started to philosophise for the sake of philosophising. Photographers, like businessmen, politicians, writers, artists etc can take themselves very seriously and it is good to explore some of the myths that have been built up.

      To do so, however, you need to try to understand, and this is where I think, she came up short.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is a collection of related essays, on the topic of photography. Photography as a practice, as an art, as a cultural phenomenon. It was written 40 years ago, and for that reason I could not help but wonder the entire time I was reading it, what on earth would this author think now? With all but the most rudimentary mobile phones having photographic capability, the practice of capturing images (let alone the display of them) is becoming ubiquitous. Sontag takes a critical view of the proliferation of photography. The higher and higher ownership of cameras, the way cameras dictate the scene and become the focus of an event, the way photography has become art, the voyeuristic nature of it, the removed and passive way images can be 'taken' of people with or without their knowledge. It does go on and on and felt at times like a rant, however intellectually presented. And given that I have a problem with the way art is discussed already- some pretty far fetched things are assumed by the reviewers and the art crowd- I found the musings on whether or not photography should/could be art, rather....well, pointless. (My answer would be yes, its art, but let's not make a big deal of it.)But, it presented some great starting points for thinking about how cameras and photos have and are changing our lives. In spite of being rather a critical observer myself, I found myself starting to stick up for photography and its value and promise. I look forward to reading her follow-up from this one, Regarding the Pain of Others, where I might find some reflection on how she thinks it stood up.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Very good book from Susan Sontag. Essays about photos and seeing. Dificult to define, but make a whole difference for my understanding of this art.
    • 4/5
      Six meditations on the nature and implications of photography. Each essay pivots engagingly around a provocative theme: the “aesthetic consumerism” exemplified by taking and collecting photographs, the inherent surrealism of photographs, the incurable defensiveness of those who claim photography an art form, photography’s project of beautifying the world, the West as a “culture based on images.” My favorite is the second essay: “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” which traces the metamorphosis of Walt Whitman’s delirious vision of democratic vistas where beauty and ugliness are superseded, through the bland humanism of Edward Steichen and his “Family of Man” exhibit, to Diane Arbus’ clinical freakshow of “assorted monsters and borderline cases.” Being a longtime fan of historic photographs, I greatly enjoy Sontag’s thumbnail assessments of the cavalcade of photographic innovators. What I enjoy most, though, is the chance to savor what I call the “Sontag paragraph.” The SP is never too long or too short. It consists of sentences that are finely balanced carefully concentrated. The SP typically begins with a provocation like, “Photography inevitably entails a certain patronizing of reality,” and ends with something equally arresting, “Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” In between twist sinuously a series of asseverations, quotations, questions, asides, (rarely jokes), and speculations that trace the thought-motion of a woman who never stopped thinking.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      When you think the world's gone haywire and nobody out there can think a coherent thought, pick up Sontag. Of course, Sontag's dead, but nonetheless. It gives me hope for the species. Lyrical, needless-to-say thought-provoking, and affirmation that the real world exists behind pics, blogs, and disneymation.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      If you are serious about the art, implications and philosophy of photography then you must read this book. Don't let i's date put you off - photographic technology may have progressed but it hasn't left Sontag's bible behind - it's just as relevant today as it ever was.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is a collection of related essays, on the topic of photography. Photography as a practice, as an art, as a cultural phenomenon. It was written 40 years ago, and for that reason I could not help but wonder the entire time I was reading it, what on earth would this author think now? With all but the most rudimentary mobile phones having photographic capability, the practice of capturing images (let alone the display of them) is becoming ubiquitous.

      Sontag takes a critical view of the proliferation of photography. The higher and higher ownership of cameras, the way cameras dictate the scene and become the focus of an event, the way photography has become art, the voyeuristic nature of it, the removed and passive way images can be 'taken' of people with or without their knowledge. It does go on and on and felt at times like a rant, however intellectually presented. And given that I have a problem with the way art is discussed already- some pretty far fetched things are assumed by the reviewers and the art crowd- I found the musings on whether or not photography should/could be art, rather....well, pointless. (My answer would be yes, its art, but let's not make a big deal of it.)

      But, it presented some great starting points for thinking about how cameras and photos have and are changing our lives. In spite of being rather a critical observer myself, I found myself starting to stick up for photography and its value and promise. I look forward to reading her follow-up from this one, Regarding the Pain of Others, where I might find some reflection on how she thinks it stood up.
    • 4/5
      This is a slightly uneven collection of essays on photography: when they were good, they were very good. When they weren’t, they were somewhat forgettable.

      Her basic premise that the proliferation of photographic images has inured us to certain categories of events and promoted disengagement has some strong arguments. I would be interested to read her Regarding the Pain of Others in which she—reportedly—partially reverses her stance on this.
    • 5/5
      Excellent essays on the role of photography in society.
    • 5/5
      I learned so much from this book by Susan Sontag and rank it right up there with Camera Obscura by Roland Barthes. These collected essays by Sontag draw some very interesting parallels between the works of some of history's most important and prolific photographers. These are fascinating pieces on the role and positioning of photography as an art and a method of documenting the world around us.The wonderful aspect of reading this book now is the ability to sit with laptop close at hand and actually be able to see the works of photographers she references in her essays. These certainly reinforce and support her discussions on the topic and have lead me to learn so much about these key figures in the history of photography.
    • 2/5
      A work of very high-brow criticism, which at its worst is only clever. The best of it is very good indeed, but most of it is written with no concern for accessibility – it is anything but linear in argument. The epistemological/ontological statuses of photographs are the common threads that try to weave the separate essays together, unsuccessfully in my opinion.
    • 4/5
      These book is a collection of essays on the subject of photography written by Susan Sontag. She did a complete review of every aspect the field ... its relation with reality, art, photography on a repressive society (China) ...

      If anything one can regret that the book, written in the 70's, doesn't cover the current state of photography (how we all take pictures and share them on the internet and how that affects our memories and values.)
    • 5/5
      A very thought provoking book on the impact of images on our culture and the people who take them. It changed my view of photography.
    • 5/5
      VERY interesting and provocative read. I learned a lot about the philosophy of photography, some of the social and power aspects, and its relationship to other forms of art.
    • 2/5
      Susan Sontag's original essays on the meaning of photography and the photographic image are challenging. She presents a wide range of ideas and discusses the work of some of the great photographers of the past century. Whether you agree with her views about the aggressive nature of photography or the essential "nonintervention" of the act of taking a picture, you can savor the intelligent arguments that she presents. I was disappointed, as were others in our study group where we discussed this book, that there were no pictorial examples of the multitude of references made by Sontag. The book was nevertheless an excellent and invigorating read - one to which I shall return.

    Book preview

    On Photography - Susan Sontag

    In Plato’s Cave

    e9781429957113_i0002.jpg Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.

    To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, light-weight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

    To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

    Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.

    For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality—photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid—and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

    e9781429957113_i0003.jpg Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph—any photograph—seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something out there, just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

    While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film—the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity—and ubiquity—of the photographic record is photography’s message, its aggression.

    Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

    That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption—the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed—seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

    e9781429957113_i0004.jpg Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing—which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

    Memorializing the achievements of individuals considered as members of families (as well as of other groups) is the earliest popular use of photography. For at least a century, the wedding photograph has been as much a part of the ceremony as the prescribed verbal formulas. Cameras go with family life. According to a sociological study done in France, most households have a camera, but a household with children is twice as likely to have at least one camera as a household in which there are no children. Not to take pictures of one’s children, particularly when they are small, is a sign of parental indifference, just as not turning up for one’s graduation picture is a gesture of adolescent rebellion.

    Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself—a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness. It hardly matters what activities are photographed so long as photographs get taken and are cherished. Photography becomes a rite of family life just when, in the industrializing countries of Europe and America, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery. As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.

    As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism. For the first time in history, large numbers of people regularly travel out of their habitual environments for short periods of time. It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had. Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends, neighbors. But dependence on the camera, as the device that makes real what one is experiencing, doesn’t fade when people travel more. Taking photographs fills the same need for the cosmopolitans accumulating photograph-trophies of their boat trip up the Albert Nile or their fourteen days in China as it does for lower-middle-class vacationers taking snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls.

    A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic—Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

    People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic. In the early 1970s, the fable of the brash American tourist of the 1950s and 1960s, rich with dollars and Babbittry, was replaced by the mystery of the group-minded Japanese tourist, newly released from his island prison by the miracle of overvalued yen, who is generally armed with two cameras, one on each hip.

    Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation. One full-page ad shows a small group of people standing pressed together, peering out of the photograph, all but one looking stunned, excited, upset. The one who wears a different expression holds a camera to his eye; he seems self-possessed, is almost smiling. While the others are passive, clearly alarmed spectators, having a camera has transformed one person into something active, a voyeur: only he has mastered the situation. What do these people see? We don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. It is an Event: something worth seeing—and therefore worth photographing. The ad copy, white letters across the dark lower third of the photograph like news coming over a teletype machine, consists of just six words: … Prague … Woodstock … Vietnam … Sapporo … Londonderry … LEICA. Crushed hopes, youth antics, colonial wars, and winter sports are alike—are equalized by the camera. Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

    A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights—to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself—so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed. While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all.

    Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene. Dziga Vertov’s great film, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), gives the ideal image of the photographer as someone in perpetual movement, someone moving through a panorama of

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