on Susan Sontag's On Photography (book rant)

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I've often wondered about the expression, "Better late than never." While it sounds benign enough on the surface, if one looks a little closer there are certain ideological assumptions embedded within those four little words. Most obviously, it extols a temporal hierarchy (on-time, late, never) that speaks to an underlying linear notion of time, which carries with it both a certain inflexibility and an unshakable, if unspoken, faith in progress.

Secondly, the maxim privileges "doing" over "being" by assigning value to the accomplishment of a task. While the desire to realize one's goals seems common-sensical, it also has a tendency to underestimate the primacy of timing. What if the action in question had a specific time and specific place? The expression"Timing is everything" relays this opposing sentiment and is neatly voice by Robert Jordan and General Golz in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls:


‘To blow the bridge is nothing… You understand?’

‘Yes, I understand.’

‘Absolutely nothing. Merely to blow the bridge is a failure.’

‘Yes, Comrade General.’

‘To blow the bridge at a stated hour based on a time set for the attack is how it should be done. You see that naturally. That is your right and how it should be done’

But this is beside the point.

The point is that it's the second week of July and I have finally finished last year's summer reading list. The list was initially (and largely) compiled in preparation for my master's thesis, but somewhere along the way Susan Sontag's On Photography got left by the wayside. I read it this past week, though, and as the saying goes, "better late than never..."

After all the thousands of pictures taken by my yin and I on our honeymoon, I felt well prepared to read Sontag's book with a critical eye. During our month on the road, I watched the paradoxical ways in which the camera acts upon the individual using it: the 300mm lens bringing one closer to the image while the camera itself puts a physical barrier between the subject and the photographer. I also experienced the desire and subtle expectation for nature to reveal itself to me, for the animals and landscape and sun and moon to pose just long enough to "get a good picture."

Sontag understood all this and more. She writes:

"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." (8)

"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a 'good' picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune." (12)

In my view the question of power is inseparable from the practice of photography, and there were two times during our honeymoon that I felt this most acutely.

The first time was in San Francisco, mere minutes after our arrival:

I took this picture by setting the camera atop the dinner table, turning on the auto-focus, and hoping for the best. There was something about the woman that I still cannot explain. Her beauty was too much to let pass by, and yet what gave me the right to capture her image without her permission? The photograph was indeed taken and, consciously or unconsciously, I valued my pleasure of her beauty as more important than questions of ownership or consent.

The second time was in Santa Fe:

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This time I chose not to take the picture, not to document the image of Native Americans sitting on the ground across from their white competitors. Both sides selling turquoise and silver; both sides trying to make a living. But only one side with licenses neatly affixed; only one side speaking English as a second language. The relationship between these two groups was, and is, more complex than I can explain; but if I had photographed this image, with the road providing vertical symmetry and a clear division between the groups, something would have been lost. It would have appeared much simpler, much less confusing than the emotion I felt that day.

What are these two impulses? Why did I take one and not the other?

"Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects—unpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real." (69)

The first image, of the woman eating her dinner alone, trades on the prestige of art. There is a tension between her and the painting of the monks above her. While she eats her samosa soup, they hold their begging bowls. While she is dynamic, they are forever frozen. While she embodies the vitality of life and the living presence of the divine, they represent an idealized notion of how one should behave in order to be holy. The photograph captures all these things, and the woman's humanity (which is to say divinity) is enhanced rather than diminished by the image.

The second image, which I did not take, would have traded on the magic of the real. It would have condensed the entire history of the Southwest, the entire history of European-Native interaction into the time it takes to glance at a photo. The complexities of identity and economics and culture would have been collapsed into a single entity, easily consumable, that appeared to be real and unstaged, but actually hollowed out reality by turning it into ready-made clichés and historiographies far from self-evident.

Sontag writes:

"The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, a legacy from the sciences, which is measured not by a notion of value-free truth, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted by nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism." (86)

Again, the first photograph aligns itself with the striving for beautification, while the second would have taken its cue from an idealized, moralistic notion of the "truth." That's why I chose to take one photograph instead of the other, but it was Sontag's book that gave me the words to say so. This is not to say, however, that the impulse I followed was necessarily correct:

"The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery… Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculations, and fantasy." (22-23)

With regard to the first photograph, Sontag would accuse me (or at least my photograph) of both speculation and fantasy. I do not know the woman in the photo, I do not know her history, and I have spoken with her only long enough to discuss the menu at Burma Superstar, the restaurant where the picture was taken. And yet, I presume to Know her spirit, to touch her soul in a way I still struggle to explain.

But perhaps this is the weakness in Sontag's argument: she neglects to fully appreciate the presence of the photographer (by which I mean the Presence of the photographer). This was the case in the first photograph because, no matter how limited, I connected with the woman in the image. I sensed the Peace that dwells within the center of her being, and the image thus becomes an artifact from that encounter, a reminder that defends against the inevitable onset of doubt and forgetfulness.

But in Santa Fe I was not so clear. I was unable to experience the Peace in the situation. Instead, all I saw was the detritus of history, what Walter Benjamin called "one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage."

quote taken from Benjamin's description of Klee's Angelus Nova

Finally, Sontag writes:

"It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art." (15)

This idea, as much as any in her book of essays, highlights the current ambivalence I feel towards the photograph. For as long as I can remember, I have disliked having my picture taken. This, in spite of the existence of seemingly happy images of the past:

author, circa 1980

These early aversions were based primarily on the necessity for posing, the creation of a moment for the sole purpose of memorializing it. Even then, I recognized this as a form a discipline (the frozen, idealized past) as opposed to freedom (the uncertain possibility of the present). Thus, the posed photograph functions as both a form of bodily and emotional coercion, and as I grew older I came to disdain the entire enterprise. For this reason, almost half of my life went largely unphotographed. Those that do exist were either contrived:

self-portrait, 1999

The result of ambush:

1995

Or taken unawares:

2002

Nowadays, though, I've come to an uneasy truce with the photograph. I now recognize that the discipline I once associated with the posed photograph is far more rampant than I realized as a child. Most of us, most of the time, go about posing and performing in one capacity or another. It appears to be part and parcel to being a human being, and I've learned to accept it as one of the primary functions of the mind.

And, while still weary of photography's tendency to promote nostalgia, I've also come to appreciate the ability of words to recontextualize the image, to question and reaffirm, to create doubt and bolster faith, to criticize and promote empathy.

(All these processes are illustrated by the above words and images.)

As Sontag writes:

"Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos." (15)

This understanding is ultimately what changed my relationship to photography a few years ago. In spite of all the questions of power, in spite of the discipline, in spite of the innumerable frailties of the image, the photograph allows us to feel. In a society that seems bent on draining the emotion out of every experience – either through repression, denial, or bottling it to sell back to us in the forms of sports and news and entertainment – we should feel grateful for every practice that helps us to experience the limitless joy, sadness, and confusion that life has to offer.