Re: Susan Sontag article

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From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 12/14/02-01:32:39 AM Z


On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Jack Fulton wrote:

> 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.

or senti-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

Jack you are 10000% absolutely right... I think what's missing from sontag
may be the high hum of oh we-are-so-aesthetic-and-spiritual -- she's
analyzing the role of photography in the culture... we get the old thing
here about would you rather be -- what was it, the happy pig or unhappy
socrates... Oh, I think it was "the unexamined life isn't worth living."

But surely EVERY field needs some kind of hard-nosed analysis, how it
operates in modern life and its effect: medicine, marketing, media, et
al...

And if that book put someone off photography (it actually made me love
photography more, by assuring me my photographs would be art when I was
100 years old)....tough. I recall someone saying years ago on this list
that he wouldn't do a kind of photography people didn't like.

Um..... If every artist and photographer followed that rule, we'd be minus
some of the greatest art we have. Maybe all of it. Real innovation (as
opposed to repetition) goes against the grain... As for Baudrillard,
actually I've read a few passages from B about the simulacrum thing I
thought were swell...but in very small doses. Either way, so what? What
kind of photographs does he take? Do French photographers pay any
attention to him? Did painters stop painting when Arago sounded the knell
of doom for painting? Did anyone here stop photographing when Jed Perl
jumped up and down about photography ?

Sontag said taking a photograph of somebody was a way of colonizing
that person ? Of course, you own them. You have them in a box in your
studio -- or wherever. So ? You also romanticize, memorialize, preserve
and recontextualize them. So?

J.


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