From: Anthony JAHN (Anthony.Jahn@wanadoo.fr)
Date: 12/15/02-06:24:48 PM Z
Is there any way to get a copy of the article? The web site of the New
Yorker doesn't have much...
Thanks,
Anthony
----- Original Message -----
From: Shannon Stoney <shannonstoney@earthlink.net>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca>
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2002 6:31 PM
Subject: Susan Sontag article
> 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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