On Photography: Susan Sontag By: Pilon and Grace
On Photography: Susan Sontag By: Pilon and Grace
Ques9on 1 Sontag states that to photograph something is to “appropriate” it, to make it your own. Once that thing is “yours” you are then able to know it. Is the rela9onship between subject and ar9st the same in pain9ng as it is in photography?
Sontag, Page 4
“I can enter s9ll further into such details, observing that many of the men photographed by Nadar have long fingernails: an ethnographical ques9on: how long were nails worn in a certain period? Photographs can tell me this much beLer than painted portraits.”
Barthes, page 30 “But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out of 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 reach of the present.”
Sontag, page 4
Ques9on 2 In the age of film and manual processes, photographs were considered “evidence”, “incontrover9ble truth”. Has this no9on changed? If so, what are the responsible factors in this change?
Sontag, page 5-‐6
“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.” “A photograph passes for incontrover9ble proof that a given thing happened”
Sontag, page 5 “Yet the mask is the difficult region of Photography. Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise […] which will make it less acute. Hence the photograph whose meaning […] is too impressive is quickly deflected; we consume it aesthe9cally, not poli9cally.”
Barthes, page 36
Ques9on 3 How has the camera “democra9zed all experience”?
Sontag, page 7-‐8, 18-‐19
“Photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the word in 1972 – a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her arms open, screaming in pain – probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbari9es.”
Sontag, page 18
Ques9on 4 Considering that Sontag was in a rela9onship with Annie Leibovitz (1994-‐2004), does that make her opinion more, or less valid than Barthes, who focuses on gaining knowledge from observing?
Ques9on 5 What are the results of the socializa9on (incorpora9on in to the everyday of everyman) of photography? When did this happen? How has this affected the no9on of “Art Photography?
Sontag, page 8-‐11
“A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and photographer; picture-‐taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory right-‐ to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on.”
Sontag, page 11 “[…] put me infront of a staircase because a group of children is playing behind me, they no9ced a bench and made me sit down on it. As if the terrified photographer must exert himself to the utmost to keep the Photograph from becoming Death. But I -‐already an object, I do not struggle.”
Barthes, page 14 “Posing in front of the lens (I mean: Knowing I am posing even flee9ngly), I do not risk so much as that (at least, not for the moment). No doubt it is metaphorically that derives my existence from the photographer.”
Barthes, page 11 “when I discover myself in the product of this opera9on, what I see is that I have become Total Image, which is to say death in person. The Other turns me into an object, at their mercy, classified in a file.”
Barthes, page,14
“Amer the event has ended, the picture will s9ll exist conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it has never otherwise have enjoyed.”
Sontag, page 11 “This word retains, through it’s root, a rela9on to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”
Barthes, page 9