From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 12/13/02-08:31:51 PM Z
judy wrote:
>
> Shannon, when you speak of Sontag's "antipathy to photography" I wonder
> what you mean -- something she actually wrote, or something imputed to
> her, or something imputed to something someone else imputed to her ?
I was thinking of my last reading of On Photography which was some time ago,
and I don't have the book with me, but I remember when I finished reading it
thinking, "If I want to keep making photographs, I better not take this book
too seriously." I remember that it implied that taking a photograph of
somebody was a way of colonizing that person, and that it removed people
from reality excessively. The new article takes issue with some of these
ideas. She says in the new article,
"Consider two widespread ideas--now fast approaching the stature of
platitudes--on the impact of photography. Since I find these ideas
formulated in my own essays on photography, the earliest of which was
written thirty years ago, I feel an irresistible temptation to quarrel with
them.
The first idea is that public attention is steered by the attentions of the
media--which means images. When there are photographs, a war becomes
"real."... <Later she argues with this idea and slams Baudrillard, in a kind
of humorous way, for saying that everything now is some sort of simulacrum.>
The second idea--it might seem the converse of what has just been
described--is that in a world saturated, even hypersaturated, with images,
those which should matter to use have a diminishing effect: we become
callous. In the end, such images make us a little less able to feel, to
have our consciences pricked." <Here she argues that it is actually
television that does this the most, but then later she says that television
mostly affects privileged, rich Americans that way; that for the rest of the
world reality is too intransigent and insistent for television to take it
over, as it were.>
Some other photographers have told me that On Photography depressed them
greatly to the point that they didn't make photographs for a while, and one
person told me that it was in part due to reading and considering Sontag's
arguments in that book that he stopped photographing entirely. So, that's
why I say that those essays seemed hostile to photography. Sontag herself
seems to think this.
--shannon
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