On Photography by Susan Sontag - Essay Example

In Susan Sontag’s opinion, “photographs are experience captured”. However, photographing something appropriates the object as well. In comparison and contrast to documenting the past and linking it to the present and future through words, photography has a lesser manipulative element, leading to better expectations of authenticity. Photographs are not necessarily statements about the world as much as they are pieces of the world itself, miniatures of reality that are accessible to all.

Photographs have become a constant means of experimentation, at the hands of the earlier artists who tried to use them as an effective medium, of the modern consumerist specialists, and of those who document history and culture through them. The best means to popularize and preserve photographs is through publishing them in a book. But this would restrict the option to order them by the viewer’s preference. It also leads to a situation where quality time is not spent on viewing them, or where they are discarded altogether. Using photographs innovatively for the public was carried out by the movie Si j’avais quatre by Chris Marker. But the problem with such films is that they don’t provide photographs as collectibles.

Since photographs furnish evidence, it had been used for political purposes as well. The Paris police have used photographic evidence in the murderous roundup of Communards. Photographs also justify an act, providing proof that it has happened. The relation photographs have to reality is more innocent and accurate than other mimetic objects. While painting and prose are narrowly selective interpretations, photography can be considered narrowly selective transparency. However, the elements of taste and conscience attribute an interpretative aspect to photographs. When someone aspired to attain a specific mood or message through photographs, the photographer’s view is transposed to the object photographed. Photography differs from painting due to its utilitarian aspect.

In the early years of photography, cameras were restricted to their inventors and extremely wealthy users of it. It was eventually made a popular medium, first through its significance in recording family history, and then as a necessity in every family that is interested in documenting the growth of their children. This memorialization was part of the major shift in the post-War family structure and values. In the nuclear families, photographs were evidence of an otherwise absent extended family. The individual use of cameras had also been influenced by the changing world order. Photographs have also become an inevitable part of picnics, where new places and experiences can be documented through photographic evidence.

According to Sontag, “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”. However, the intervention during photography is limited to that of the camera. Since the act of photography makes real intervention impossible. The shocking pictures that speak of extreme violence or suffering are the products of non-intervention. The person who intervenes will not be able to record it. Photographers have to keep an indifferent attitude toward others’ misfortunes or pain if they are intent on producing good pictures that are capable of being an intervention on their terms. Read More