On Photography
I’ve learned photography by seeing and doing, looking at the photographs of old and new and trying to hone my mind’s eye to be more precise, yet all throughout I’ve not taken care to study it as I’ve studied other forms of art. This collection of essays contains a few of Sontag’s syntheses, and I enjoyed how it didn’t get bogged down in smaller details or specific photographs and instead provided a greater picture of the philosophy around photography and how it evolved, from the 19th century inventors of photography to the mid 20th century. The book feels modern but also so ancient, as when Sontag wrote it, there were no digital cameras nor phone cameras. Yet, the trends toward collecting images, of images replacing reality, all of them could have been foretold by the commercialization of film cameras even then, and foretold them she did.
Photography is an art because it can lie – I found this to be so provocative at first, yet when I thought about it some more, I could find no alternative truth. It’s not so much a stretch of imagination to think about how painters or sculptors can lie with their art, or how rhetors lie with theirs, but for a photograph, so long heralded by courts of law and of public opinion as unquestionable proof that “something, somewhere, that really did happen”, the argument is murkier. Of course, retouching a photo is obvious lying, the kind of lying you can tell by the overly-smooth skin, the exaggerated contrast. But, the lying that keeps me thinking revolves around the decisions of shots we keep, and even, which shots we don’t even take. The shots not taken consist of a mass stockpile that becomes a grand lie of omission. Taking this line of reasoning to its ends, then photography is not so much about the shots taken, but the shots that the mind’s critical eye says, “no, that’s not good enough” or “I don’t like this shot” after envisioning it or seeing it in the viewfinder. Then, the photographer is lying; and he or she becomes an artist.
% grep -i "on photography" quotes.txt11 matches
on photography
“Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography
“In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure over another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. This very passivity of the photographic record is photography’s ‘message’, its aggression”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography and death
“All photographs are memento mori. By slicing out a moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography and death
“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”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography
“The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those whom desirability is enhanced by distance”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography
“Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography
“Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography and social class
“Seen from the middle-class perspective of photography, celebrities are as intriguing as pariahs”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography
“The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography and painting
“By taking over the task of realistic picturing hitherto monopolized by painting, photography freed painting for its great modernist vocation – abstraction”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
on photography
“The urge to have new experiences is translated into the urge to take photographs: experience seeking a crisis-proof form”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography