From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 12/13/02-11:31:35 AM Z
I think it was on this list a while back that we were talking about Susan
Sontag and the rumor that she re-canted about some of the stuff she said in
On Photography. (But it could have been on the pure-silver list.) Anyway,
the December 9 issue of the New Yorker has a long article by her, mostly
about war photography ( a timely subject) but also about how she has
rejected the idea that photography somehow makes us insensitive to reality,
through over-exposure to images of suffering and death. She says that she
has decided that this is mostly a problem with television, not still
photographs. She kind of says that "reports of the death of reality" have
been greatly exaggerated. She says those French critics like Baudrillard
etc are, because they are French, "licensed to be hyperbolic." I"ve always
thought that. IT seems like the French language sort of lends itself to
word games. A lot of that French art and literature criticism seems
perfectly plausible, or at least amusing, in French, but when you translate
it into English, it looks pretty crazy. Wonder why that is. Anyway, I
think if you are going to believe that stuff you should only believe it, and
read it, in French.
Here's the kicker: she says, "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a
breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small,
educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has
been converted into entertainment....It assumes that everybody is a
spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real
suffering in the world."
I think the upshot of this article is that photography is not the suspect,
possibly malevolent medium she once thought that it was. Also, as in the
paragraph quoted above, she makes some strong arguments against the
postmodern and deconstructionist ideas that have dominated the art world and
photography for a couple of decades.
There are some photographs attached to this article, some of which are very
famous and which no doubt you have seen and been horrified by, but there is
a new one I had not seen before by Jeff Wall, a sort of surreal imagined
scene of dead Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, talking to each other. She
discusses this amazing photograph at some length. At first I thought it was
a photoshop "do" but apparently it is not: it is a tableau of the sort that
Joel Peter Witkin does.
--shannon
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