On Photography. - Sontag's on Photography at 20 - book reviews

Afterimage, March-April, 1998 by Michael Starenko

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention.

- Susan Sontag

The first sentences of Susan Sontag's "In Plato's Cave" establish the tone of moral judgment that pervades her subsequent essays on photography. Framing photography within Western philosophy, Sontag can scold with the best of Cassandras: photographers and their cronies foist images of half-truths upon us cave-dwellers, who, unregenerately, eat 'em up. Sontag can sound like Baudelaire in places, shaking her fist at the bourgeois, unpoetical sensibilities that photographic epistemology helped to enact.

The essays that eventually became On Photography (1977) had an electrifying impact upon many readers and photographers when they were first published in the early to mid-1970s. On one hand, they validated a medium that had attracted little critical, and even less theoretical attention in the United States. Here was one of New York's brightest lights writing seven lengthy essays on photography in the leading intellectual journal in the country, the New York Review of Books. Sontag helped make photography fashionable in publishing and intellectual circles, which in turn bolstered the growing popularity of the medium. One wonders, in retrospect, how many general readers got beyond the polished veneer of Sontag's essays and sensed the bite in her views.

The photographic community, however, felt the bite plainly enough. Sontag's writing was a far cry from the rhetoric that photographers and other insiders had utilized since the days of Camera Work. Post-World War II photographic writing reflected the New Criticism of I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks and others, in which photographs were taken to be self-contained icons that achieved the timelessness of other sanctified art. In both literary and photographic criticism, irony and ambiguity were highly valued. Subject matter was secondary; the process of seeing transcended that which was seen.

In the 1960s, John Szarkowski's writing attracted many art photographers and educators, both because it provided useful handles for discussing specific images and valorized the auteur status of the photographer. Similarly, the photographer-writers gathered together in Nathan Lyons's Photographers on Photography (1966) discussed their craft in ways that were largely indistinguishable from how Modernist painters and sculptors talked about theirs. In general, the writings of photographers, critics and historians like Beaumont Newhall told a story of heroism, as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and others fought the good fight for photography's status as art, while the likes of W. Eugene Smith and Robert Frank fought different, but related, battles against "the system." Much insider photographic writing avoided the issues that Sontag raised in her essays - the paradoxes of photographic practice and meaning, the responsibility and ethics of photographers and the mixed blessings that this technology had conferred upon society.

Accordingly, it was not surprising that the reviews of On Photography were pervasively negative. In playing the provocateur, Sontag made sweeping pronouncements about an enormous and ungainly medium, and too often they didn't hold water. Her style relied more on unquestioning pronouncements than sustained argument, and this, combined with her position outside the photographic community, created in some photographers and reviewers a curious stew of sour grapes, xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. More substantively, her insistence that photographic meaning derived more from the world reflected in images than from its formal elements challenged the operative interpretive conventions within the photographic community, while privileging painting and literature.

But it was Sontag's repeated insistence that photographers were "predatory" and "appropriative" that incited most of the passion, since these charges impugned the motives and actions of photographers while denigrating the images they made. While my photographs were nothing like those of Weegee or Arbus, I nonetheless began to consider my motives. Did my outwardly placid images mask an inner voracity? need for control? rage for order? When I posed models, was I trying to possess them? Was I subjecting them to my own private realities and dreams, thereby draining them of theirs? Was I violating their trust? And once these photographs were exhibited - whether on a gallery wall or in a publication - would they be seen and understood by viewers in ways that traduced my intentions as well as the lives and events depicted in the photographs? Not all of these questions were explicitly raised by Sontag, but they grew out of my reading of her essays. Accordingly, I was inwardly motivated to find flies in the ointment of her arguments in order to dismiss much of what she said. This rejection was theory put to the service of self-interest, since denial seemed preferable to some of the alternatives, including the possibility of my cameras taking up permanent residence behind the shoes in the closet.