‘On Photography’
Reviewed by WILLIAM H. GASS
Published: December 18, 1977
ON PHOTOGRAPHY
By Susan Sontag
Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable, the anonymous narrator of one of Borges’s apocalyptic tales tells us, because they multiply and disseminate an already illusory universe; and if this opinion is, as seems likely, surely true, then what of the most promiscuous and sensually primitive of all our gadgets — the camera — which copulates with the world merely by widening its eye, and thus so simply fertilized, divided itself as quietly as amoebas do, and with a gentle buzz slides its newborn image into view on a coated tongue?
No simple summary of the views contained in Susan Sontag’s brief but brilliant work on photography is possible, first because there are too many, and second because the book is a thoughtful meditation, not a treatise, and its ideas are grouped more nearly like a gang of keys upon a ring than a run of onions on a sting. I can only try, here, to provide kid of dissolute echo of her words. The hollow sounds are all my own.
Susan Sontag not only has made films — and written critical essays (“Notes on Camp,” “Against Interpretation”) and fiction — she also has a passionate interest in the Nikon’s resonant echo or the Brownie’s little print, as this beautiful book attests. Every page of “On Photography” raises important and exciting questions about its subject and raises them in the best way. In a context of clarity, skepticism and passionate concern, with an energy that never weakens but never blusters, and with an admirable pungency of thought and directness of expression that sacrifices nothing of sublety or refinement, Sontag encourages the reader’s cooperation in her enterprise. Though disagreement at some point is certain, and every notion naturally needs refinement, every hypothesis support, every alleged connection further oil, the book understands exactly the locale and the level of its argument. Each issue is severed at precisely the right point, nothing left too short or let go on too long. So her book has, as we say, a good head: well cut, perfectly coiffed, uniform or complete in tone of color, with touches of intelligence so numerous they create a picture of photography the way those grains of gray compose the print.
Sontag’s comments on the work of Diane Arbus are particularly apt and beautifully orchestrated, as she raises the level of our appreciation and understanding of these strange photographs each time, in the course of her exposition, she has occasion to remark upon them. But these six elegant and carefully connected essays are not really about individual photographers, nor solely about the art, but rather about the act of photography at large, the plethora of the product, the puzzles of its nature.
Principal among these problems is the fact that “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. Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken by anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as representative of photography’s characteristic powers as Stieglitz or a Walker Evans.”
Technical finish is not a measure. Intention scarcely maters. The subject alone signs no guarantee. I once took a terribly overexposed photograph of a Spanish olive grove, but if you thought I had intended the result, you could admire the interplay of the trees’ washed-out form, the heat that seems to sweep through the grove like the wind. The fact is that, although there are many calculations which can be made before any photograph is taken, and of course tricks can be played during the developing afterward the real work is executed in a single click. A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
The decisions a photographer must make, compared to those of the flower-arranger or salad chef, are few and simple indeed. The effects of his actions are dominated by accident: the ambiance of an instant in the camera’s apprehension of the world. The formal properties of photographs, even the most formal ones, are too often exhausted in a glance, and we return to the subject, again and again, with other than esthetic interest. So far, certainly, the artistic importance of the camera has been secondary to its effect on society, on our knowledge of processes like aging, of things and beings (like the body of the opposite sex), on our standards of illustration an documentation, our ability to influence others with its powerful rhetoric, its untiring surveillance. It has changed the composition of our amusements and pastimes beyond return, altered our attitudes toward seeing itself.
One realizes, reading Susan Sontag’s book, that the image has done more than smother or mask or multiply its object. My face is only photography, and people inspect me to see if I resemble it. The family album demonstrates to me what I don’t yet feel: not that I was young once, but that I’m old now. Time, so long as it lingers in the look, is visible to us in this photographic age in a way it was never visible before, among familiar things, we fail to measure change with any accuracy; but the camera records one step upon the stone, and then another, until the foot has worn a hollow like a hand cupped to catch rain. Process has become perceptible in the still.
And that is strange. For the still photograph is rarely of a still subject, although in slower days one was cautioned not to move; and the image the camera caught, and was made to cough up, was an image already stopped, seized, like the victims of Pompeii’s lava, in the slow flow of the subject’s will. We can easily see the difference now, because, out of the continuities of experience, the sitter (that was the word) selected the slice that was to stand for his or her life, the prettiest or most imposing self (although this itself took skill that few possess); whereas it is normally the camera that makes the choice these days, and we are encouraged to relax, to guard against being on our guard, as if the pose were merely that, and the candid camera, more likely to serve up a fairer, fuller share of us that our own decision would supply. Besides, ceremonies are another thing of the past, and a visit to the photographer is itself something to be photographed before it disappears like the Aborigines. What was once a black box with a backwards beard, a menacing presence, a merciless eye, has become as discreet as a quick peek, friendly as an old chum, ubiquitous as bees at a picnic or Japanese school children at a shrine.
But camera enthusiasts are nor always fans of the photograph. There are too many benefits in the point and click itself. The business of taking a picture is, first of all, a flattering and righteous one, as Sontag points out, so the shooter is accorded considerable respect: If the subject, we are pleased to have been found “pictorial,” worthy of homage or memorial; if a bystander, we do not wish so come between the lens and its love, so we stop or turn aside or otherwise absent our image. It is bad manners to block the view or be insensitive to the claims of the camera.
We have learned to read resemblance as easily as English. A photograph is flat, reduced, rigidly rectangular like the view-finder, cropped out of space like a piece of grass, sliced from time like cheese or salami, fixed on a piece of transportable paper, soft or glossy as no perception is, often taken at artificial speeds, positions, distances, so we can “see” both shatters and implosions, the pale denizens of caves or the deep sea, the insides of minerals, as she says, crystals, sky, the speed of bees; and almost invariably, in the case of the serious camera, the photograph is composed wholly of shadow, its shades going from gray to gray like night or our moods in a state of depression; yet we breathe in its illusions like a heavy scent.
Sontag omits none of these matters, touching on them frequently, each time in a more complex and complete way, though her method (exactly appropriate to the vastness of her subject, the untechnical level of her language, the literary nature of her form) allows only the brush, the mention, the intriguing suggestion. Given my own philosophical biases, I should have been pleased to see her weigh more heavily the highly conventional character of the simplest Polaroid. However, the belief in the realism of its image is fundamental to the cultural impact of the camera, and since that is an important part of her theme, she is right to stress it.
Even if the camera were more like the eye than it is, and Sontag is both put off and beguiled by the parallels, it sits steady as the spider for the fly, sees only in a blink, and is sightless 99 percent of the time — while we see between blinks as between Venetian blinds, and our sight is thus relatively uninterrupted, in a sense continuing even through our sleep.
When we see, there is always the “I” as well as the eye. There is the frame of the eye socket, the fringe of hair, the feel of the face, our hungers, hopes and hates – that full and exuberant life in which objects seen are seen because they’re sought, complained of, or encountered — though no photograph contains them. And when we carry away from any experience a visual memory (remote, conventional, schematic in its own way, too … no souvenir), that recollection is private, not public; it cannot be handed round for sniggers, smiles or admiration; it cannot lie a lifetime in a box to be discovered by distant cousins who will giggle at the quaintness of its clothing.
No. I think that I would want to say that the camera only pretends to be an eye. It creates another object to be seen, yet one that exists quite differently than a perception; not merely differing as people differ who come from different climates and geography, but as entities differ which have their homes in different realms of Being. It is not sight the camera satisfies so thoroughly, but the mind; for it creates in a click a visual concept of its object, a sign whose substance seems seductively the same as its sense, yet whose artificiality is no less than the S’s that line the sentence like nervous sparrows on a swaying wire.
Sontag discusses, it seems to me, a number of separate, though not necessarily equal or even exclusive views of what the serious purpose of photography might be, apart from the immediate needs of sentiment and utility it so obviously serves. The camera certainly confers an identity on whatever it isolates, however arbitrary the framing. It permits its subject to speak to the world, in a way it would otherwise never be able to do, by multiplying its presence, taking it from its natural environment and placing it within the reach of many, as though it could live well anywhere, like the starling.
The lens removes reality from reality better than a surgeon, and allows us to witness killing with impunity, nakedness without shame, weddings without weeping, miracles without astonishment, poverty without pain, death without anxiety. It discovers a desirable titillation in overlooked, humble, ugly, out-of-the-way or unlikely objects, often reflecting the interest of a social class in what the camera considers exotic.
It can create an image that will interpret its object , so that the shot will not be a cartoon balloon fixed to something real, but a caption of commentary, like an epitaph, beneath. In addition, the camera finds forms in nature that are the same as those which establish beauty in the other arts, an thus proves that photography is itself an art — an art of structural epiphany, if God has had a hand in the laws of Nature.
The camera is a leveler. It makes everything photogenic. Every angle of an object has an interest, as has every object from any angle, every entrance, every exit, however odd or quick or small or previously proscribed. A scullery maid may make a better picture than a queen. And the eye is omnivorous as an army of army ants. The perfect cook, the camera can make anything, in a photograph as on a platter, look good. Of course, the camera may be registering exactly that relation of eye and apprehension which give the machine is particular epistemology.
The image is magically superior to the word because, though a gray ghost, the photo is believed to possess actual properties of its object. Furthermore, the relation between image and object has been made by machine — a device that lifts off a look with less wear than a rubbing — yet what in the image is the same as its source?
In a sense, what one catches in a photograph is reflected light, and film is like river sand that receives the imprint of the drinking deer, or mud that preserves the tire tread of a robber’s car; but the causal connection is loose, and can be faked. Suppose, for instance, we contrived to dimple up an image, by artificial means, created the picture of a person who never existed (doctored photographs do that for events). The photo would still “look like” a man, but it would not be the image of anybody, and so (without its of) would not be an image. Would it any longer be a photograph?
The great equalizer, the camera has brought democracy to the visual levels of the world. Now images accompany us everywhere, even attesting to our quite fragile and always dubious identity (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein: I am I because my shrunken photo shows me). Though only a hundred years old as an art, photography seems already ageless as a skill, its product without limit, even if its images are not immortal and do decay, and even if some species are endangered. Perhaps they move us too easily, as though we stood on skates. Perhaps, at the same time, we have grown too familiar with the way the camera makes our common clay seem strange. Now, not even strangeness is unfamiliar.
Instead of text accompanied by photographs, Susan Sontag has appended to her book a collection of quotes, framed by punctuational space and the attribution of source. These are clipped from their context to create, through collage, another context — yet more words. And for a book on photography that shall surely stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon the subject, maybe there is a message, a moral, a lesson, in that.
William H. Gass is the author of “Omensetter’s Luck,” “Fiction and the Figures of Life,” “On Being Blue” and other books. He is professor of philosophy at Washington University, St. Louis.
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