From: Jack Fulton (jefulton1@attbi.com)
Date: 12/13/02-09:40:08 PM Z
I pretty much, in fact . . really . . don't agree here. I read Ms.
Sontag's book when it came out and felt for a neophyte she was brilliant and
figured out photography pretty darned good. In fact, I have consistently
been surprised why others who have become photographers don't have the same
motis operandi. In some way, most photographers of today have been beguiled
by the Szarkowski/Newhall/Adams mentality.
For those who quit making photographs after reading her book . . w/out me
sounding grumpy or rude (hopefully) . . I'd say they had zero passion to
begin with and perhaps worked with the medium as a dilettante . . or, in
English, were dabblers.
I thought . . gosh, it's a long time ago now . . her 'brilliance' was more
succulent than anything Beudrillard has done.
Anyway, not to cause overt criticism, those are my 2¢
Jack
>>
>> 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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