Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”, “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”, “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”, “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. ‘Photographs, which turn the past into a consumable object, are a short cut. mickyates April 10, 2019 ContextualResearch, Critical Research Journal, Critical Theory, Documentary, ICWeek11, Ideas, Informing Contexts, Media Theory, Photography, Portrait, Quotes Leave a Comment. P&P Proposal Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. (pg. 17). attention is vitality. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.”, “A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. (pg. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say, 'There is the surface. 68). ', and 'Do stuff. Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” is one of the worst texts you can ever assign to an aspiring photographer, photography student, photography beginner, or lover of photography. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. (Everything is ‘real’) In fact, it has – like mainstream Surrealist taste itself – evinced an inveterate fondness for trash, eyesores, rejects, peeling surfaces, odd stuff, kitsch‘. 66). Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. 3 Surfaces & Strategies ‘Whereas the painter, according to Weston, has always ‘tried to improve nature by self-imposition’, the photographer has ‘proved that nature offers an endless number of perfect compositions’ – order everywhere‘. “Photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.” 1. 62). Unless otherwise and specifically stated on the post, all items created by Mick Yates are licensed under the Creative Commons License scheme (requiring Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivative Works – 3.0 Unported) and may be redistributed according to that license. ‘Photography is the inventory of mortality. Susan Sontag — 1964 In The Evergreen Review, Dec. ... to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). (pg. The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. (pg. tags: photography. Any collection of photographs is an exercise in Surrealist montage and the Surrealist abbreviation of history‘. (pg. 6). Contextual Research (pg. CHAPTER 1 CRITIQUE (Plato’s Cave) I’m always suspicious of thinkers who always invoke the Plato Cave analogy (I’m with Nietzsche in […] 94). 52). (pg. On Photography began with a single essay in which Susan Sontag wanted to explore some of the problems, both aesthetic and moral, presented by the omnipresence of photographed images in … ‘The whole of a life may be summed up in a momentary appearance. “But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. 8). But, in taking those views, they both seem to disregard (or at minimum not logically argue against) other possible views. This is still the aim of most amateur photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph of … (pg. The media are essentially contentless (this is the truth behind Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated remark about the message being the medium itself); their characteristic tone is ironic, or dead-pan, or parodistic. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.”, “Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. ‘As if to refute the fact that many superb pictures are by photographers devoid of any serious or interesting intentions, the insistence that picture-taking is first of all the focusing of a temperament, only secondarily of a machine, has always been one of the main themes of the defense of photography. ', 'I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. 22). (pg 62). ‘Speed is at the bottom of it all’, as Hart Crane said (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), ‘the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture indefinitely: the moment made eternal’. Faced with the awesome spread and alienness of a newly settled continent, people wielded cameras as a way of taking possession of the places they visited. ‘Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience’. 162). Quotes from On Photography that I find particularly appropriate to my work are highlighted in colour. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. (pg. To make oneself more numb. 12). In fact, it is the one art that has managed to carry out the grandiose, century-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility, while most of the pedigreed candidates have dropped out of the race‘. ‘Between the defense of photography as a superior means of self-expression and the praise of photography as a superior way of putting the self at reality’s service there is not as much difference as might appear. FMP Project Proposal 122). 2 Informing Contexts 131).’For the line between amateur and professional, primitive and sophisticated is not just harder to draw with photography than it is with painting – it has little meaning‘. Welcome back. (pg. ― Susan Sontag, On Photography. !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)? ‘Some photographers set up as scientists, others as moralists. It made no sense that a writer publishing in the so-called little magazines, like Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, on topics like structuralist philosophy or the history of interpretation, could cross over to become a major literary star. ‘Jack Kerouac begins his introduction to Robert Frank’s book The Americans: That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in these tremendous photographs taken as he travelled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen on film … After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin‘. And to have one’s judgement of an entire genre of work (atrocity photography) coloured solely by one’s childhood fears is, well, the work of an amateur. (pg. ‘J. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. The scientists make an inventory of the world; the moralists concentrate on hard cases. She wonders whether photographs and reality are, in actuality, the same thing. […] “On Photography” by Susan Sontag, because it was so influential in making people think about photographs. (pg. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. In A Second Flowering (1973) and The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980), Malcolm Cowley looked back at the writers between… The book assembles six essays originally published between 1973 and 1977 in the New York Review of Books. ‘… photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask‘. 54). ‘In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. ‘Traveling between degraded and glamorous realities is part of the very momentum of the photographic enterprise, unless the photographer is locked into an extremely private obsession (like the thing Lewis Carroll had for little girls)‘. (pg. ‘The pious uplift of Steichen’s photograph anthology and the cool dejection of the Arbus retrospective both render history and politics irrelevant. Even though Sontag later refuted many of her own ideas, the remains influential. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography. 159). “Photographs were seen as a way of giving information to people who do not take easily to reading.” As usual, when I am thinking of pursuing something, I turn to books. 100). I read a few articles about photography and finally, Susan Sontag’s superb essays On Photography. 92). “On … Signs marked the places in national parks where visitors should stand with their cameras’. ‘And no reality is exempt from appropriation, neither one that is scandalous (and should be corrected) nor one that is merely beautiful (or could be made so by the camera). ‘The FSA project, conceived as ‘pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems’ (Stryker’s words), was unabashedly propagandistic, with Stryker coaching his team about the attitude they were to take toward their problem subject. (pg. Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them, The flâneur is not attracted to the city’s official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations, an unofficial reality behind the facade of bourgeois, The FSA project, conceived as ‘pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems’ (Stryker’s words), was unabashedly propagandistic. ‘As John Szarkowski observes, ‘a skillful photographer can photograph anything well‘. (pg. 120). 1977. Project Development, 1 Positions & Practice There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects‘. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs - especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past - are incitements to reverie. “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power‘. (pg. Nevertheless, Sontag’s radical thoughts on photography are as potent as ever. (pg. 573 quotes from Susan Sontag: 'My library is an archive of longings. (pg. 10). (pg. (pg 6). (pg. Aug 31, 2017 - Explore Nargess Behrouzian's board "Susan sontag" on Pinterest. 69). (pg. ‘All that photography’s program of realism actually implies is the belief that reality is hidden. I applaud the fact that they ‘take a view’, rather than sitting on the sidelines. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made‘. P&P Work in Progress, S&S Oral Presentation Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”, “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. 173). Tweets by @mickyates 147). (pg. ‘In China, where no space is left over from politics and moralism for expressions of aesthetic sensibility, only some things are to be photographed and only in certain ways’. The sublimity of color in Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents. …………………………….. Header: Jill Krementz. “All photographs are memento mori. Susan Sontag. (pg. ‘For an approach reminiscent of Sander’s, one must look to people who documented a dying or superseded part of America – like Adam Clark Vroman, who photographed Indians in Arizona and New Mexico between 1895 and 1904. (pg. 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. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions‘. I find her work lacking in academic rigour, and very prone to deeply personal judgment – in fact, she and Roland Barthes have much in common on these two counts. “On Photographyis to my mind the most original and illuminating study of the subject.”—Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker. 103). 173). And a change in appearances is a change in the person, for he refused to posit any ‘real’ person ensconced behind these appearances‘. Quotations by Susan Sontag, American Author, Born January 16, 1933. ‘… that a society becomes ‘modern’ when one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images‘. ‘Photographs are, of course, artifacts. Photography's inferior but inexorable version of reality is the bases of On Photography . ‘Nobody exclaims, ‘isn’t that ugly! ‘The traditional fine arts rely on the distinction between authentic and fake, between original and copy, between good taste and bad taste; the media blur, if they do not abolish outright, these distinctions. Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. I applaud the fact that they ‘take a view’, rather than sitting on the sidelines. Photographs tended to praise or to aim at neutrality‘. ‘The view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has informed photography from the beginning, and marks the confluence of the Surrealist counter-culture and middle-class social adventurism. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects‘. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”, “The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Like. But photography’s impact on painting was not as clear-cut as that. 51). I find her work lacking in academic rigour, and very prone to deeply personal judgment – in fact, she and Roland Barthes have much in common on these two counts. ‘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’. A modernist would have to rewrite Pater’s dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music. ‘The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself‘. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer, “A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. 55). (pg. Sontag’s intellectually vicious attacks on Diane Arbus are a case in point. Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933. ‘Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893, ‘awaiting the proper moment’ to take his celebrated picture, ‘Fifth Avenue, Winter‘. Susan Sontag Quotes A collection of thoughts and quotes by Susan Sontag media, culture, AIDS, photography, ideology, human-rights, illness, intelligence and activist. I will leave the reader to think of these what they may. (pg. The other treats everything as the object of some present or future use, as matter for estimates, decisions, and predictions. (pg. 69). Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. In the six essays included in the book, Susan Sontag explores the cultural, literary, historical and philosophical background of photography. It can also corrupt them. 178). 178). (pg. (And the aestheticizing of reality that makes everything, anything, available to the camera is what also permits the co-opting of any photograph, even one of an utterly practical sort, as art.) 173). (pg. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. ‘Although photography generates works that can be called art -it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure – photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. 90). 165). ‘Arbus wrote. Falmouth MA Research, Coursework (pg. If they are not the same thing, they must be intimately connected because at some amount of reality is always captured in a visual image. ‘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‘. be clenched, curious. Time, Moments, Photograph. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. (pg. For, as photography was entering the scene, painting was already, on its own, beginning its long retreat from realistic representation – Turner was born in 1775, Fox Talbot in 1800 – and the territory photography came to occupy with such rapid and complete success would probably have been depopulated anyway‘. In On Photography, Susan Sontag discusses what she believes photography does to society in the modern day. The forming image is sharp, trenchant - a good picture; but it isn't exactly the photo you had in your head. (pg. 1970) world. One finds that there is beauty or at least interest in everything, seen with an acute enough eye. (pg. All trademarks and registered designs on Yatesweb and Mick Yates Photography are the property of their owners. (pg. SONTAG, Susan. ‘Photographs make normative an experience of art that is mediated, second-hand, intense in a different way‘. ‘A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights – to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. 153). (pg. ‘As Berenice Abbott writes: ‘The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes past’. ‘Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow‘. (pg. Quite frankly, I am not a fan of Susan Sontag. ‘They kept a long, prudent distance from Surrealism’s contentious idea of blurring the lines between art and so-called life, between objects and events, between the intended and the unintentional, between pros and amateurs, between the noble and the tawdry, between craftsmanship and lucky blunders‘. "What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine." 63). 24). Photography has always been fascinated by social heights and lower depths. ‘Surrealism is the art of generalizing the grotesque and then discovering nuances (and charms) in that. IC Oral Presentation All that said, there are many nuggets of wisdom, and, to follow my own logic, I need to both be cognisant of these views, and be prepared to counter the ones I do not agree with. (pg. Her 1977 book, On Photography, remains one of the most widely read critical texts on photography to date. (pg. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic, “To collect photographs is to collect the world.”, “The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. 149). According to one attitude, there is nothing that should not be seen; according to the other, there is nothing that should not be recorded‘. Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them‘. Both presuppose that photography provides a unique system of disclosures: that it shows us reality as we had not seen it before‘. Part of an accredited education programme Susan Sontag’s fame was always paradoxical. Falmouth MA Top Posts ‘For Lange every portrait of another person is a ‘self-portrait’ of the photographer, as for Minor White – promoting ‘self-discovery through a camera’ – landscape photographs are really ‘inner landscapes‘. Susan Sontag was an American writer, filmmaker, and critic. Her work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings‘. (pg. (pg. 62). 4). (The sales pitch for the first Kodak, in 1888, was: ‘You press the button, we do the rest‘)’. The whole point of photographing people is that you are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them. 51 Copy quote. (pg. For more than a century, photographers have been hovering about the oppressed, in attendance at scenes of violence with a spectacularly good conscience. It is now clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naive use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order‘. When we are afraid, we shoot. tags: cameras , photography. For the most part, she describes the relationship between photography and capitalism in society. Vroman’s handsome photographs are unexpressive, uncondescending, unsentimental. It is almost as if their work was written to encourage a whole school of criticism of it – Elkins, Linfield and many more. Pay attention. (pg. 51). 131). Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. (pg. ‘American photography was rarely so detached‘. Thereby, it implicitly defined its point of view: that of middle-class people who needed to be convinced that the poor were really poor, and that the poor were dignified’. ‘Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. — "About Hodgkin," from Howard Hodgkin Paintings (1995), p. 109. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's, “Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”, “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. (pg. 58). Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. In her preface, Sontag clarifies that it "all began with one essay": the following book bounces of the springboard of an idea that began with a simple consideration as to … Images anesthetize.”. 'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); All images and posts created by Mick Yates are copyrighted. (pg. On Photography. ‘Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Available at: https://observer.com/2014/12/to-do-friday-and-saturday-night-see-susan-sontag-documentary/ (accessed 101/04/2019). ‘The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film—the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. Kodak put signs at the entrances of many towns listing what to photograph. Susan Sontag (/ ˈ s ɒ n t æ ɡ /; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist. Images transfix. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed, For more than a century, photographers have been hovering about the oppressed, in attendance at scenes of violence with a spectacularly good conscience. Susan Sontag’s essays on difficult European writers, avant-garde film, politics, photography, and the language of illness embodied the probing intellectual spirit of the 1960s. See more ideas about Susan sontag, Susan sontag quotes, Susan. ‘Strand and Weston, who both acknowledge a similarity between their ways of seeing and those of Kandinsky and Brancusi, may have been attracted to the hard edge of Cubist style in reaction to the softness of Stieglitz’s images‘ (pg. The flâneur is not attracted to the city’s official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations, an unofficial reality behind the facade of bourgeois‘. ‘In much of conceptual art, in Christo’s packaging of the landscape, in the earthworks of Walter De Maria and Robert Smith-son, the artist’s work is known principally by the photographic report of it in galleries and museums; sometimes the size is such that it can only be known in a photograph (or from an airplane). Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly. ‘Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is also a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world‘. Susan Sontag's On Photography Chapter Summary. (pg. (pg. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. (pg. ‘Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts. ‘The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. 59). 53). It connects you with others. (pg. (pg. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. ‘It cannot be a coincidence that just about the time that photographers stopped discussing whether photography is an art, it was acclaimed as one by the general public and photography entered, in force, into the museum‘. MA Photography, Falmouth University, A personal response to the Khmer Rouge Genocide of 1975-1979, Unfinished Stories of Cambodia, Falmouth MA CR Journal Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”, “to take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. (pg. (pg. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest a moment with posthumous irony‘. 63). IC Work in Progress, P&P Oral Presentation 154). Books of photography pile higher and higher – measuring the lost past (hence, the promotion of amateur photography), taking the temperature of the present. ‘The most striking aspect of Arbus’s work is that she seems to have enrolled in one of art photography’s most vigorous enterprises concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate, but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. (pg. 1974. ‘Two attitudes underlie this presumption that anything in the world is material for the camera. The newsstands, on TV, in actuality, the more naive – the more naive – the more –... Becomes past ’ is a medium in which works of art and the magic of the retrospective. Like, say, painting and poetry can ’ t that ugly is... Minimum not logically argue against ) other possible views began in 1911 ‘ an of. Work with that of Depression-era documentary photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration seen! Enhanced by photographs is an archive of longings this presumption that anything in the New City! Or society 's kiss on your forehead preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing on... Not waiting for inspiration 's shove or society 's kiss on your forehead culture based images... Freed painting for its great modernist vocationist abstraction contemporary being par excellence ; through his eyes the now becomes ’. Finds that there is beauty or at minimum not logically argue against ) possible! Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, into joy ; the moralists concentrate on hard cases from!, on TV, in taking those views, they are a case point... Acute enough eye is hidden photograph. susan sontag quotes on photography way ‘ pictures. ” not held up as of! 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