With the recent passing of Susan Sontag, I thought it time to reread "On Photography," her 1973 explication (or rant, depending on your point of view) on the mediation of reality through the medium of photography. When I read it in 1978, it had such a profound impact on me that I gave up my camera for two years.
As I remember my conundrum back then, it had to do with Sontag's view that the photographer, by the nature of the medium, is incapable of being other than predatory and acquisitive towards his subject. At 23, my struggle as a photographer, and as a person, was how to be a participant, instead of a witness, to life. I was lonely, depressed, and socially inept, and my photographs from that era document my mood starkly. It's actually some of the strongest work I've ever done, But I did not like the stark choice that Sontag seemed to portray. I still had a burning need to make images, so I turned instead to printmaking--intagliio and lithography. Here my search for a relationship with reality through an image making process became an all consuming reality about the act of making images. If that sounds circular, it was, and the images reflect that.
Sontag's first essay in the book, "In Plato's Cave," can be read as largely a polemic against the objectification inherent in the act of photography: "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. "
Oh, so that's what I was doing in Italy.
"On Photography" is a rich book, only partly mired in its era, and to be recommended. A working knowledge of photographic history is a prerequisite for understanding many of the references. There is much to dispute in her point of view, however. The point I want to argue is from my own recent experience.
Was my eight days of wandering Venice an acquisitive act? In part, well, sure. I would say that artists have been mining Venice for images for far longer than photography has been around. This is one of my main points with Sontag. She separates the spheres of painting and photography too cleanly, and too oppositionally. I saw the same impulse to represent a felt experience of Venice in paintings spanning five hundred years that I felt too. Coaching the impulse in the pejorative, and blaming the medium for the problem, is not accurate and not terribly useful.
My goal in Venice was to make images of the city that portrayed its exotic and sensuous qualities. That hardly makes me unique. Whether my photographs will be is yet unanswered. I wanted to have a long enough stay in the city to chart the progess of my changing reactions and relationship to the environment.
As a photographer I am using the medium to have experiences I would not otherwise have. It allows me to be a participant through a highly structured act of witnessing. It is how I understand a place, and my stance in that place. Sontag would say that I am committing a kind of aggression in my trophy hunting. My response? I can think of no better way to respect the place I am than through the act of making these photographs.
PS. Speaking of trophies—I found the lost digital files from Venice. About a thousand of them are now transferred to the home computer.
PPS. I bought the chandelier.
Very wonderful to read your words about Susan. I hope many like you are now re-reading that early delcious book....
Posted by: TERI | January 21, 2005 at 07:56 PM