{"id":6888,"date":"2022-08-05T14:54:02","date_gmt":"2022-08-05T14:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/?page_id=6888"},"modified":"2023-06-28T14:16:22","modified_gmt":"2023-06-28T14:16:22","slug":"thoughts-on-photography-what-sontag-actually-wrote","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/?page_id=6888","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Photography: What Sontag Actually Wrote"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a id=\"top\"><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/?page_id=6904\"><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\">Return to Theme Table of Contents<\/span><\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/\"><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\">Return to VJIC Table of Contents<\/span><\/a><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/716420599?h=d4921b8846\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p style=\"text-align: left; padding-left: 80px;\"><em><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\">Theme editor:<br \/>\nBruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. Some of his books are Places: Things heard, things seen (BlazeVox, 2019) Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons (Texas, 2013), Being There: Bruce Jackson Photographs 1962-2012 (Burchfield Penney Art Center, 2013) and <\/span><\/em><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><i>Was of the Hand: A Photographer\u2019s Memoir<\/i>\u00a0(SUNY Press 2022)<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\"><strong>Against Photography: What Sontag Actually Wrote<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>I: Critical Voices<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Susan Sontag, in her prefatory note to <em>On Photography<\/em> (1977), a compilation of essays published in <em>New York Review of Books<\/em> 1973-1977, describes the book as \u201ca progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It has been, among cultural critics, one of the most highly regarded texts on the photographic image. John Berger gives it a chapter in <i>About Looking<\/i> (1980): \u201cUses of Photography: For Susan Sontag.\u201d <i>New York Times <\/i>culture critic\u00a0A.O. Scott wrote about it more recently (\u201cHow Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think,\u00a0<i>NY Times<\/i>, October 8, 2019). On October 1, 2022, The Folio Society announced the publication of a coffee table edition, for $125US, the \u201cFirst Illustrated Edition,\u201d which \u201cincludes 21 key photographs from prestigious photographic archives, all beautifully reproduced and positioned carefully throughout the text\u201d and an introduction by Mia Fineman, a curator in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The list of non-photographers who written favorably about the book is long.<\/p>\n<p>But few photographers share that regard.<\/p>\n<p>Sontag has little empathy for the people in the few photographs she describes. Photography for her is a world of generalizations. For photographers, as for surgeons and airplane pilots, it is a world of specificity. Surgeons and pilots can speak about bodies and flight, but every gall bladder and takeoff is specific. So with photographs. That\u2019s where the primary discontinuity happens. It may go to the schism between the humanities and art, between a world of about and a world of doing.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7037\" style=\"width: 208px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/https:\/\/www.scribd.com\/document\/226017966\/Sontag-on-Photography-Rosetta-Books\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7037\" class=\"wp-image-7037 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/book-cover-Sontah-198x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/book-cover-Sontah-198x300.png 198w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/book-cover-Sontah-99x150.png 99w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/book-cover-Sontah.png 452w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-7037\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Book cover. The book may be downloaded at: https:\/\/www.scribd.com\/document\/226017966\/Sontag-on-Photography-Rosetta-Books<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>On Photography<\/em> ignores almost entirely the materiality of the craft. Making photographs isn\u2019t theoretical, and neither are photographic prints. The first is a behavior in the real world; the second a fact of it. To write about both with little or no acknowledgment of their physicality or specificity substitutes the critic\u2019s impressions for the reality; it makes her message the medium, at the expense of the medium itself.<\/p>\n<p>In his review of a Peter Hujar exhibit at Le Jeu de Paume (<em>LRB, <\/em>19 December 2019), Brian Dillon notes that Hujar\u2019s long relationship with Sontag ended when she published\u00a0<em>On Photography: \u201cHujar was not alone in thinking she had no sense of photography as art. Avedon, he reported, had said: \u2018You know, Peter \u2013 sometimes I think that Susan may be the enemy.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>II: Words<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The word \u201cphotography\u201d is like the word \u201cwriting.\u201d It can refer to a behavior, to objects made by that behavior, to the technologies involved in that behavior, and more. The possibilities are inexhaustible. Without a context, the words are so overladen with possibilities they are empty of meaning.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWriting\u201d includes novels, letters, prescriptions, parking tickets, laundry lists, diaries, moist letters puffed out by a slow-moving airplane in the sky, graffiti, recipes, good and bad checks, judicial opinions. The act of \u201cwriting\u201d can be accomplished by making lines in wet clay with a stylus; applying particulate matter to an absorbent or retaining surface with pen, pencil, brush, or other device; pressing keys on a typewriter or computer keyboard. Some written things are, within their category, better or more useful than others; \u201cbetter\u201d and \u201cuseful\u201d depend on the value system and needs of any individual or institutional user and the specific situation. Sylvia Plath\u2019s letters to her mother and analyst were one thing when she wrote them, another when her mother read them, another when we read them knowing the poetry and suicide that followed. The words are the same; the uses and meanings are not. A bank check is fungible: produce it at a bank counter and it is exchanged for specie\u2014unless any part of it is illegible, in which case it is nothing more than a useless slip of paper.<\/p>\n<p>Millions of people write poetry. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. For all of it, \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d are meaningful only within the context of a particular poem and its use. A very good graffito or greeting card quatrain might not make it into a collection titled \u201cGreat Poems in English That Rhyme Written Before 1900.\u201d Sophocles, Sappho, the biblical David, William Shakespeare, Stephan Mallarm\u00e9, e. e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson and Anna Akhmatova all wrote poetry. Any generalization\u2014other than the three words ending the previous sentence\u2014 that lumps them into a single activity with a single meaning is a generalization that abolishes all distinction.<\/p>\n<p>The same can be said of \u201cphotography.\u201d But that is an insight that has gone missing, partly due to the continuing influence of Sontag\u2019s collection, which blends the various possible meanings of that word as act and as object. Sontag uses the word \u201cphotography\u201d to mean, interchangeably and usually without modification, what photographers do, how photographic images are used, photographic images themselves, and mechanical reproductions of photographic images. Most of the time, the text treats \u201cphotography\u201d as monolithic, as if it were something all photographers engaged in the same ways and for the same reasons. Occasionally it distinguishes different kinds of photographic activity, but again and again, it returns to the overarching \u201cphotography.\u201d Sometimes, Sontag\u2019s usage includes cinema; sometimes it doesn\u2019t. She writes about movies and photographs as if they\u2019re the same thing, which they\u2019re not.<\/p>\n<p>She acknowledges this fundamental fact only once in the entire book:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left; padding-left: 80px;\"><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><em>Although photography generates works that can<br \/>\nbe called art\u2014it requires subjectivity, it can lie,<br \/>\nit gives aesthetic pleasure\u2014photography is not,<br \/>\nto begin with, an art form at all. Like language,<br \/>\nit is a medium in which works of <\/em><\/span><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><em>art (among<br \/>\nother things) are made.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Yes. But <em>On Photography<\/em> doesn\u2019t \u201cbegin with\u201d this. The passage occurs near the end, on page 148 of 180 pages of text (page numbers all refer to the 2002 Penguin Classics edition). She makes no reference to it anywhere else, nor does she acknowledge this concept anywhere else, nor does it inform anything else she says about photographers, photographic work, or the use of photographs.<\/p>\n<p>Save for some comments on the German portraitist August Sander and a chapter on her responses to the work of Diane Arbus, <em>On Photography <\/em>is almost devoid of reference to specific photographers or photographs. There is almost nothing about people who make pictures or specific pictures. Photographers are named <em>en passant<\/em>, but almost never in relation to any specific work.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7040\" style=\"width: 1021px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7040\" class=\"wp-image-7040 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.35.49-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1011\" height=\"487\" srcset=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.35.49-PM.png 1011w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.35.49-PM-300x145.png 300w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.35.49-PM-150x72.png 150w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.35.49-PM-768x370.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1011px) 100vw, 1011px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-7040\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Screen copy, Goggle search for Diane Arbus,\u00a0 31 July 2022<\/p><\/div>\n<p><strong>One paragraph<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>(note: all page numbers refer to &#8220;<em>On Photography&#8221;,<\/em>2002 Penguin Classics edition)<\/p>\n<p>I want to gloss one paragraph from <em>On Photography<\/em> in detail, so my subsequent comments don\u2019t fall into the same error of untethered generalization I find central to the book itself. This is the paragraph as it appears in the book:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 80px;\"><em>Putting on shows of photographs has become as featured a museum activity as mounting shows of individual painters. But a photographer is not like a painter, the role of the photographer being recessive in much of the serious picture-taking and virtually irrelevant in all the ordinary users. So far as we care about the subject photographed, we expect the photographer to be an extremely discreet presence. Thus, the very success of photojournalism lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographer\u2019 work from another, except insofar as he or she has monopolized a particular subject. (133)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Now the gloss:<\/p>\n<p>Putting on shows of photographs has become [<em>by whom and where? when did it become? what was it previously?<\/em>] as featured a museum activity as mounting shows of individual painters [<em>other than the few dedicated photography museums, \u201cshows of photographs\u201d nowhere comprise more than a fraction of shows by individual painters<\/em>].<\/p>\n<p>But [<em>The logical preposition \u201cBut\u201d implies that what follows contradicts what preceded it. Not here: the sentence following that \u201cBut\u201d has nothing at all to do with the previous sentence. It leads into a non sequitur.<\/em>] a photographer is not like a painter, the role of the photographer being recessive in much of the serious picture-taking <em>[what is a \u201crecessive\u201d photographic role? how much? who and what defines \u201cserious\u201d? is the article now comparing \u201cserious picture-taking\u201d to all painting by all painters? If so, why not just the \u201cserious\u201d painters?]<\/em> and virtually irrelevant in all the ordinary users <em>[another shift in subject: picture-takers, \u201cserious\u201d or not, and \u201cusers\u201d aren\u2019t the same people, or, if they are the same people, they\u2019re doing different things. A \u201cpicture taker\u201d is someone who takes a photograph. A \u201cpicture user\u201d could be someone tucking a photo in a letter to a distant lover, a gallery curator, a TSA inspector at an airport, the photo editor at a newspaper, the reader of that newspaper, and so forth. What constitutes \u201cordinary?\u201d Are those who are not ordinary extraordinary?]. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>So far as we care about the subject photographed, we expect the photographer to be an extremely discreet presence. <em>[What constitutes \u201can extremely discreet presence\u201d and what evidence is there that anyone has this expectation, or ever did? What does our \u201ccare about the subject\u201d have to do with the photographer\u2019s work? If we don\u2019t \u201ccare about the subject photographed,\u201d do we have different expectations about the photographer\u2019s discretion?] <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Thus, the very success of photojournalism <em> [The conjunctive adverb \u201cThus,\u201d as the \u201cBut\u201d above, implies that what follows is a consequence of what was just said. It doesn\u2019t: what follows the \u201cThus\u201d has no connection at all to what precedes it. How did we get from photographs and photographers to the subset \u201cphotojournalism?\u201d This is a new subject, a non sequitur.] <\/em>lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographer\u2019 work from another, except insofar as he or she has monopolized a particular subject <em>[superior in what regard? who is doing the distinguishing? who is having the difficulty? What does a photographer\u2019s having \u201cmonopolized a particular subject\u201d have to do with \u201cthe very success or photojournalism\u201d or \u201cthe difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographer\u2019s work from another?\u201d What does it mean for a photographer to monopolize a particular subject?]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The paragraph is not about what photographers do, what photographs are, or how photographs are used. The prose in the paragraph flows, but none of it is true.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0Exempla<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Here are twelve passages from <em>On Photography <\/em>in which I have underlined statements that are false, undocumented, undocumentable, absurd, supercilious, or which invoke such questions as: How does this apply to baby photos, autopsy photos, retinal photos, newspaper photos, ID photos, landscape photos? How does it apply to the work of Nan Goldin, Paul Strand, Bruce Davidson, William Eggleston, Annie Leibovitz, Ben Shahn, Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, Stephen Shore? All those declarations: if there\u2019s nobody there, who\u2019s doing it? Is the generalization so broad it obliterates all meaning? Do the frequent qualifiers (<em>seem, most, may, a certain, often<\/em>) obliterate all meaning? Does the passage apply to you when you take, look at or otherwise use or employ photographs? And, most important: what\u2019s the evidence for the assertion?<\/p>\n<p>Small wonder that\u00a0<u>photography critics and photographers seem anxiou<\/u>s. Underlying many of the recent defenses of photography is\u00a0<u>the fear<\/u>\u00a0that photography is already a senile art,\u00a0<u>Most<\/u> tourists <u>feel compelled<\/u> to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. <u>Unsure of other responses<\/u>, they take a picture. (10)<\/p>\n<p><u>Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world<\/u> <u>which levels the meaning of all events<\/u>.\u00a0 11<\/p>\n<p>After thirty years, <u>a saturation point may have been reached<\/u>. In these last decades, <u>\u201cconcerned\u201d photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it<\/u>. 21<\/p>\n<p>The knowledge gained through still photographs will <u>always<\/u> be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be a knowledge at bargain prices\u2014a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom; as <u>the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape<\/u>. 24<\/p>\n<p><u>That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes<\/u>, Mallarm\u00e9, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. <u>Today everything exists to end in a photograph<\/u>. 24<\/p>\n<p><u>Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people<\/u>. 70<\/p>\n<p><u>Photography inevitably entails a certain patronizing of reality<\/u>. 80<\/p>\n<p><u>Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs<\/u>. 85<\/p>\n<p><u>Subjects are chosen because they are boring or banal<\/u>. 137<\/p>\n<p>Small wonder that <u>photography critics and photographers seem anxiou<\/u>s. Underlying many of the recent defenses of photography is <u>the fear<\/u> that photography is already a senile art, littered by spurious or dead movements; that <u>the only task left is curatorship and historiography<\/u>. 144<\/p>\n<p><u>Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.<\/u> 147<\/p>\n<p>The possession of a camera <u>can<\/u> inspire something akin to lust. And <u>like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second, because the project is finally self-devouring<\/u>. 179<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s nobody home in those twelve statements (I could more than quadruple the samples). It\u2019s writing in the service of itself.<\/p>\n<p>And some passages are just gibberish:<\/p>\n<p><em>Photography is the paradigm of an inherently equivocal connection between self and world\u2014its version of the ideology of realism sometimes dictating an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates the self. One side or the other of the connection is always being rediscovered and championed.<\/em> 123<\/p>\n<p><strong>II: Pictures<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Most of what I\u2019ve noted thus far has been about style, the sort of things a careful editor or English teacher reading a student paper might note. There are more fundamental problems with <em>On Photography<\/em>: how Sontag imagines the photographic event and how she regards the result of that event, what she thinks (or says) photographers do, and what she says photographs are.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Thought<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A central aspect of the artistic process and, more fundamentally, of the way the human brain works, is how the awareness of a moment <em>always<\/em> lags our brains\u2019 response to a moment. There\u2019s a library of neuroscience writing about this half-second gap, but anyone who has ever hit the brakes while driving a car, caught a dish falling off a table, slipped but not fallen on the ice, moved a hand from a hot pot handle, or taken a photograph is fully aware of it. You think before; you think after; in the moment, you act. This is why Sontag\u2019s misrepresentation of the great street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is even more of a misunderstanding of the role of thought in photography than a misstatement about Cartier-Bresson:<\/p>\n<p><em>Cartier-Bresson has likened himself to a Zen archer, who must become the target so as to be able to hit it; thinking should beforehand and afterwards,\u2019 he says, \u2018never while actually taking a photograph.\u2019 Thought is regarded as clouding the transparency of the photographer\u2019s consciousness, and as infringing on the autonomy of what is being photographed.<\/em> 116.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7044\" style=\"width: 220px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7044\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-7044\" src=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-4.39.44-PM-210x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"210\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-4.39.44-PM-210x300.png 210w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-4.39.44-PM-105x150.png 105w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-4.39.44-PM.png 378w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 210px) 100vw, 210px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-7044\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Henri Cartier-Bresson, Google search 31 July 2022<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Sontag transforms Cartier-Bresson\u2019s descriptive statement into an intransitive prescriptive: \u201cThought is regarded\u201d followed by something he did not say. Henri Cartier-Bresson did not say that thinking clouds a photographer\u2019s consciousness; Susan Sontag said it. Cartier-Bresson was writing about how a photographer no more has to pause to think what the shutter finger is up to than a touch typist has to wonder where each individual letter might be or a pianist has to wonder where each ivory key might be or why dancer or ice-skater has to wonder where this or that foot should go to keep one from falling on one\u2019s ass.<\/p>\n<p>Cartier-Bresson explained this in a passage she did not quote:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em>&#8220;The photographer\u2019s eye <\/em>is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail\u2014and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it. But he composes a picture in very nearly the same amount of time it takes to click the shutter, at the speed of a reflex action.&#8221; <em>(Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind\u2019s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers, New York: Aperture, n.d., 33)<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Color<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Artists work with what they\u2019ve got. Photography, like all the other arts, is physical. Art may start in the head, but it manifests elsewhere. There are real-world components to artistic work. Just as a dancer can jump only so high and the human ear can hear only certain pitches and the human eye can only see certain parts of the visual spectrum, photographers operate within the boundaries of their physical options: what can my camera do? how fast is the film? how can the print be produced and managed? how can it be displayed?<\/p>\n<p>Everything about the making of a photograph involves choice and trade-offs. Alter the aperture (to alter the depth of focus, or admit more or less light) and you have to alter the shutter speed or change the recording ability of the medium (in film days, it was ASA or EI).<\/p>\n<p>The choice between color and black and white is grounded in what the photographer wants the photograph to look like. Colorized versions of film noir classics almost always look wrong. Why? Because the photographers were organizing the images in terms of shadow and light, not patches of color. A colorized version of a Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange image from the 1930s: something always looks wrong.<\/p>\n<p>Contra Sontag, Cartier-Bresson was fully aware of these issues:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The operation of bringing the color of nature in space to a printed surface poses a series of extremely complex problems. To the eye, certain colors advance, others recede. So we would have to be able to adjust the relations of the color one to the other, for colors, which in nature place themselves in the depth of space, claim a different placing on a plane surface\u2014whether it is the flat surface of a painting or a photograph.&#8221; (<em>Mind\u2019s Eye<\/em>, 37)<\/p>\n<p>He is writing about the way a burst of red or yellow in an image can dominate the organization of space in that image. A photographer can organize an image in terms of color, in terms of planes and lines, in terms of light and dark, or all three. In each instance, a different set of choices dominate.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, Sontag is disdainful of actual practice in her comments on color versus black and white: \u201c\u2026many photographers continue to prefer black-and-white images, which are felt to be more tactful, more decorous than color\u2014or less voyeuristic and less sentimental or crudely lifelike. But the real basis for this preference is, once again, an implicit comparison with painting&#8221; [128].<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7057\" style=\"width: 2106px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7057\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7057\" src=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-5.08.56-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2096\" height=\"1062\" srcset=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-5.08.56-PM.png 2096w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-5.08.56-PM-300x152.png 300w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-5.08.56-PM-1024x519.png 1024w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-5.08.56-PM-150x76.png 150w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-5.08.56-PM-768x389.png 768w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-5.08.56-PM-1536x778.png 1536w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-08-05-at-5.08.56-PM-2048x1038.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2096px) 100vw, 2096px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-7057\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Henri Cartier-Bresson Goggle Serach result, 31 July 2022<\/p><\/div>\n<p>What evidence is there for any of that? The only photographer she cites here is, again, Henri Cartier-Bresson, nearly all of whose career took place when there was no high-speed color film available. She faults him for not endorsing color photography late in his life, after he\u2019d abandoned photography for drawing. Most of the time he was working, there was no color film available that could capture what he was trying to show or was suitable for the kind of work he did. The fault wasn\u2019t in him; it was simply a fact of the technology available during which his vision matured. He <em>did<\/em> use color in some of his commercial photography (Sontag seems unaware of this), but it wasn\u2019t a suitable medium for his preferred realm of street photography. When he turned to drawing, he drew only in shades of black, the color space he\u2019d spent most of a lifetime mastering.<\/p>\n<p>Why does she use the intransitive: \u201cwhich are felt?\u201d Felt by whom? And, if that feeling does in fact exist among \u201cmany photographers,\u201d how does she know that their \u201creal basis for this preference\u201d has to do with painting? And what kind of painting and by whom? Jackson Pollack? Rembrandt? Mary Cassat? the highway crew putting down new lane stripes? the guy who painted her house?<\/p>\n<p>Sontag\u2019s problems with color photography go far beyond her arguments with Cartier-Bresson:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em>(The fact that color photographs don\u2019t age in the way black-and white photographs do may partly explain the marginal status which color has had until very recently in serious photographic taste. The cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the photograph from patina.) For while paintings or poems do not get better, more attractive simply because they are older, all photographs are interesting as well as touching if they are old enough. It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph\u2014only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones<\/em>. 140-141<\/p>\n<p>I haven\u2019t a clue what \u201cThe cold intimacy of color seems to seal of the photograph from patina\u201d means. If \u201cthere is no such thing as a bad photograph,\u201d can we also say there is no such thing as a bad painting or poem? Once again, there is no agency: \u201cless interesting\u201d to whom? \u201cLess relevant\u201d to what? \u201cLess mysterious\u201d than what?<\/p>\n<p>All photographs of the real are, by their very nature abstractions: for starters, they are flat. The world is not flat. A photographic print is, absent decay, the same this moment and the next: the world is not. A photograph stops at its edges; the world continues in all directions. The world is not black and white, but neither is it the color of a color print: different brands of color film record colors differently, and different brands of printing paper render information from a color negative differently, and a color print looks different under different lighting conditions. Black and white film and print is extremely more stable over time that color film and color prints. Kodachrome, the most stable of color films, does not have the stability of black and white films.<\/p>\n<p><strong><u>Narrative deficit<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Sontag faults photographs for not providing something photographs cannot possibly provide. This derives from her commingling of the making, manifestations and uses of photography.<\/p>\n<p><em>Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph. Of course, photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and the past: for example, Jacob Riis\u2019 images of New York squalor in the 1880s are sharply instructive to those unaware that urban poverty in late-nineteenth-century America was really that Dickensian. Nevertheless, the camera\u2019s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses. As Brecht points out, a photograph of the Krupp works reveals virtually nothing about that organization. In contrast to the amorous relation, which is braced on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand.<\/em> 23<\/p>\n<p>She\u2019s discovering the wheel.<\/p>\n<p>A photo does not show what it does not show; that doesn\u2019t mean the camera is <em>hiding<\/em> anything any more than an angiogram hides the lifestyle or hereditary traits that produced what it reveals to someone making use of it.<\/p>\n<p>Every proud papa showing a photo of his new baby to someone at the office knows he has to explain who the person in that photo is. As Gary Winogrand said, \u201cThe fact that photographs \u2014 they\u2019re mute, they don\u2019t have any narrative ability at all. You know what something looks like, but you don\u2019t know what\u2019s happening, you don\u2019t know whether the hat\u2019s being held or is it being put on her head or taken off her head. From the photograph, you don\u2019t know that. A piece of time and space is well described. But not what is happening\u201d (Interview with Bill Moyers, <em>Creativity, <\/em>WNET, 1982).<\/p>\n<p><em>Furthermore, not all photographs are informational; some are compositional, as in much of the work by Man Ray, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Josef Sudek, Andr\u00e9 Kert\u00e9sz, Frederick Sommer, Josef H. Neumann, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Lotte Jacobi and Nathan Lyons.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>One needs information to understand an informational photograph in exactly the same way one needs information to understand a number: \u201c12\u201d has no meaning other than that it designates the serial entity between 11 and 13. To know what at particular 12 means, you have to know if you\u2019re discussing a carton of eggs, the months in a year, a roll of the dice, an example of a superior highly composite number, the number of Earth years for a full cycle of Jupiter, the number of sides in a dodecagon, the number of keys on a piano comprising an octave, etc. Sontag may find the import of Riis\u2019 images in her Dickensian comment; that is nicely literary. But the impact of those photographs had nothing at all to do with Dickens: they revealed what had not been seen, and there were specific social and legal consequences of that. Embedded in Riis\u2019 narrative, they had a real impact in the world.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, what does any of this have to do with photography, as opposed to everything else? A horseshoe is useless without a horse or a doorway or spike in the ground, and a shell casing found in an empty room is, absent a collateral narrative, just a shell casing. A medical diagnosis is a narrative. We live in narrative. And we make, have and use photographs. The place of photographs in narrative is entirely incidental.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7047\" style=\"width: 966px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7047\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7047\" src=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.33.21-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"956\" height=\"534\" srcset=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.33.21-PM.png 956w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.33.21-PM-300x168.png 300w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.33.21-PM-150x84.png 150w, https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-02-at-4.33.21-PM-768x429.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 956px) 100vw, 956px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-7047\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Susan Sontag, Goggle image search, 31 July 2022<\/p><\/div>\n<p><strong>The Photographic original<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Sontag\u2019s writing about the photographic original reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what a photographic image is, or, worse, a disinterest in engaging it:<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore, although no photograph is an original in the sense that painting always is, there is large qualitative difference between what could be called originals\u2014prints made from the original negative at the time (that is, at the same moment in the technological evolution of photograph) that the picture was taken\u2014and subsequent generations of the same photograph. (What most people know of the famous photographs\u2014in books, newspapers, magazines, and so forth\u2014are photographs of photographs; the originals, which one is likely to see only in a museum or a gallery, offer visual pleasures which are not reproducible). 140<\/p>\n<p>This assumes that the \u201coriginal\u201d is the first print, or the first print displayed, or, as she says here, \u201cprints made from the original negative.\u201d The original isn\u2019t the <em>print<\/em>; the original is the <em>negative<\/em>, and that is as specific and unique as any painting. A print from a negative\u2014one made in the day or a century later\u2014is an interpretation of that negative, in exactly the same way that a performance of a Schubert quartet is an interpretation of Schubert\u2019s score. Each performance of a piece of music and each print of a photographic image is unique\u2014to that performance or printing. None of them is the original of anything but itself.<\/p>\n<p>No print drawn from a negative or positive transparency is an original image; it is a product of the original image. A print from a negative made in a darkroom may vary from another print not only in the aperture and time settings of the enlarger, but the temperature and vigor of the various liquids: developer, fix, stop, rinse, as well as the particular paper used. A single contact print made from a glass plate that is shattered immediately after that print was made is still not the original image; it is rather the single print made from that original.<\/p>\n<p>(Two kinds of photographs are themselves unique: they come into existence in the course of a process that consumes the original material: Polaroids and Daguerreotypes, for example. They can be copied, but there is only one original: the developed Polaroid or Daguerreotype. Sontag writes about neither of them.)<\/p>\n<p>Sontag wrote before the digital age, but what I write here applies equally well to photography now. Prints made from a digital file are, just like prints made from a negative: all are extractions from the original.<\/p>\n<p><strong><u>III: Particulars<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A book has different demands than a journal opinion article. Assertion and opinion may provide enough structure to hold up through an article in a journal that prizes both, but a book needs more. Over the length of a book, the assertive flaws of the articles don\u2019t diminish one another, they multiply, just as the probability of two events, each with a 50% chance of happening is not 100%, but 25%. What may have worked in the narrow bounds of an article in a periodical becomes, in the context of a book, epidermal intellectualizing and solipsism about the unspecified work of unnamed others. It\u2019s beef stew\u2014absent the beef.<\/p>\n<p><em>On Photography<\/em> is a book only in the most obvious physical sense: it is a lot of pages, bound by covers, with a spine holding them together. There is no interpretive or analytical arc holding the chapters together. To the contrary, in juxtaposition, the individual chapters reveal how small a part the work of photographers and the nature and use of photographs has to do with any of this. Photography isn\u2019t the subject of <em>On Photography<\/em>; it is the excuse for it.<\/p>\n<p>What if all or most of <em>On Photography<\/em> were written in the first person rather than positing a world in agreement with the absent author? What if Sontag had written, \u201cI think\u201d or \u201cI feel\u201d or \u201cIt seems to me,\u201d rather than all those intransitives implying action, thought or motive to unnamed people? I haven\u2019t a clue. That\u2019s not the book she wrote. There\u2019s no \u201cwhat if\u201d once a manuscript is printed and bound any more than there is about a choice we made last week or last year: it is what it is. It\u2019s done, fixed in time, just like a photograph. Speculation is another enterprise entirely.<\/p>\n<p>The six chapters comprising <em>On Photography<\/em> are barely altered from the way they originally appeared over a three-year period as articles for <em>New York Review of Book<\/em>s<em>, <\/em>a journal in which books are the ostensible subject, but in which opinion and writing often are the primary product. How would these articles have fared at the <em>New Yorker<\/em>, with its rigorous fact-checking department? All the questions I\u2019ve posed here, and more, would have been delivered to the author of a submission there. The kind of global utterance prized by <em>NYRoB<\/em> (based on the presumed authority of the writer), is what is consistently challenged at <em>The New Yorker.<\/em> At the <em>New Yorker<\/em>, you can get away with some sentences like these, but you have to earn them.<\/p>\n<p>I thought of ending with the last line of Macbeth\u2019s soliloquy after his wife\u2019s suicide: \u201ca lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It fits, but better, I think is William Blake\u2019s marginal note to Sir Joshua Reynolds\u2019 assertion (in <em>Discourses<\/em>, 1778) that the \u201cdisposition to abstractions, to generalizing and classification, is the great glory of the human mind.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Blake, master of words and images and also of them in combination, wrote, &#8220;To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t that Blake disavowed all generalization\u2014that very gloss was one\u2014but for him, a generalization had to be earned. There is a lot of good writing about a lot of things in <em>On Photography.<\/em> Photography is not one of them.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/716427757?h=b3bcaf5102\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#top\">Top<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Return to Theme Table of Contents Return to VJIC Table of Contents\u00a0 Theme editor: Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. Some of his books are Places: Things heard, things &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/?page_id=6888\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88910,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6888","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P2KsSU-1N6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/88910"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6888"}],"version-history":[{"count":45,"href":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7591,"href":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6888\/revisions\/7591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vjic.org\/vjic2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}