Susan Sontag, On photography

This book gathers several essays written by Susan Sonntag on her thoughts about photography.

There is an isatiability of the photographing eye. The photographers choose for us what is worth looking at and what we have a right ot observe. Photograph is a transfer of a reality on the medium paper. It is transforming a four dimension environment in a two dimensional object. Photographs are objects "ligtweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store". The photographs catch an instant. "They provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present." "A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing has happened", but can also be used as a fake proof. Photographs used in Soviet Propaganda, were manipulated in that purpose. Polaroids were yesterday what the smartphones are today. They are catching an instant reality which is not composed. They allow people to capture a moment quickly for difeerent finalities. They are registering in place of our memories some images which we want to fix. "Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience". This dimenson is usually less important with our quick snap shot, or with digital photography as they can be easily manipulated afterwards. Photographers are imposing their point of view on a subject. Photographs are framing a part of a reality. The photographer dictates what we should look at, and not what we would have necessarily looked at. "The industrialization of camera technology democratizes all experience by translating them into images". Photography was born from scientific research. It has been discovered from an early age by people who were trying to fix te reality on a paper. Research based on the light captured in a camera obscura. It is a combination of science from alchimy to history. History as a recorder of events, from family chronicles to historical improvements or discoveries.

"Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world". "Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention". The person who records is considered as an observer. They are in a way "apolitical" as long as they are behind a camera, but the results of their work are political and are used in that way to denounce. 

"Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology. Manufacturers reassure their customers that taking pictures demands nos skill or expert knowledge, that the machine is all-knowing, and responds to the sligtest pressure of the will." The science progress and today's research makes people are taking better and better photographs. Each photographer has a chance to produce a piece of art, or  to witness an event which can be used in newspapers.  

I like that quote " a photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of abscence". We carry photographs of our beloved to have them with us. We frame photographs we like as witness of a good moment. Is it nostalgia or memory?

Photographs open our eyes but also transform our first schoked reaction in a long term habit. We are getting used to seeing strong images. "One's first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horroris a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation." A photography is a catalyser of emotion. There is a before and an-after a photography. Some very strong events which are printed unforgiveably in our brain. Nothing will be as it was before. For Susan Sonntag, it happened when she was 12 and came across photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau in 1945. But, "images anesthetize. The vast catalogue of misery and injustice througout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary - making it appear familiar, remote ("it's only a photograph"), inevitable." 

"Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution". Is there any allusion to Andy Warhol or Pop'Art movement? Were they the initiators of this trend to promote the person as an object. 

Films Jean-Luc Godard, Les Carabiniers, 1963 - Chris Marker, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires, 1966 - Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929 - Hitchcock, Rear Window, 1954 - Antonioni, Blowup, 1966 - Michael Powell, Peeping Tom, 1960 - 

Photographers  Julia Margaret Cameron, Walker Evans, David Octavius Hill, Dorothea Lange,                              Ben Shan, Russell Lee