Looking into the Camera

...Writers & Writing LOOKING INTO THE CAMERA BY JOHN SIMON WHAT GOOD company Susan Sontag's mind is' There are writers whom we never want to read, no matter how fascinating their subjects may be Others we read selectively But there is also a small group of writers interesting on any subject Whether or not you care about photography, Susan Sontag's On Photography (Farrar, Straus & Gironx, 207 pp , $7 95) is a book you will not want to miss, and not simply because it is by a fine literary critic and a stimulating albeit uneven filmmaker and fiction writer No, it is above all because that mesmerizing mind of hers makes traveling into a photograph with Sontag as spellbinding as going through the looking glass with Alice Photography is a subject that has become ripe for the picking, and it is to Sontag's credit to recognize such ripeness—as she previously did with camp, whatever one might have thought of her definitions and conclusions For the curious truth is that no serious critic-essayist has addressed himself to photography as an artistic, social, political, and moral phenomenon, except marginally in an occasional tribute to a particular photographer Walter Benjamin, one of Sontag's idols, did in fact write an essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility," but it is only partly concerned with photography, and has a rather more specialized field of interest What was needed, then, was a philosophical inquiry into the nature of photography by a thinker rather than a photographer (the two being very nearly mutually exclusive), from the vantage points of esthetics (is photography an art7), ethics (isn't photography the most sinister form of invasion of privacy7), history (what is photography's role in recording and influencing the course of events7), and philosophy (does photography tell the truth, and, if so, what is it...

...The six variations on a theme—six separately published, loosely connected, yet deeply related essays—making up Sontag's book address themselves to the peculiar ambiguities that surround, permeate, in fact constitute, the process and activity that, after various other names, settled on "photography " This activity fluctuates between oppo-sites art and non- (or anti-) art, objectivity and subjectivity, the pursuit of "truth" (often at the cost of ugliness) and the pursuit of beauty, humble self-effacement and aggressive self-assertion on the practitioner's part, professionalism and amateurishness—for some of the most important, perhaps best, pictures have been taken by innocents with a camera These dubieties peculiar to photographv make some of us reject it as an art, but, as Sontag tells us, so too do many leading photographers who claim for it instead a unique and higher status It is impossible to summarize cogently what this book says Sontag's mind roams freely through many areas ot dazzlingly diverse vet well-buttressed knowledge This mind has, like the butterflv in Robert Grave1;' poem, in lieu of "the art ot flving straight," the perhaps more valuable "flying-crooked gilt " Call it a helicopter style Son-tag is able to oversee her subject from great heights or almost graze it at a variety ot speeds or even hover near-motionless above it, always with maximal maneuverability It is a rare thing to find an American essayist unselfconsciously conversant with all the arts and social sciences, and no stranger to natural science, mixing them all freely, staking out a claim in everything knowable without any Mirandolan bravado All this, of course, on top of thorough immersion m photography itself both photographs and the writings of, or about, photographers In fact, if the book has a serious flaw, it is that Sontag seems to have absorbed or evolved so many ideas about photography that it is finally hard to tell where she stands...

...Answers to these questions are hard to come by Sontag at least presents admirably Socratic aponas Even if On Photography does not provide unquestionable answers, it posits unanswered questions in the place of false security and dangerous misconception It restores the label terra incognita to domains riddled with quicksands and infested with dragons, through which some fortunate travelers have wandered with fortuitous impunity but without bringing back much information...

...The very question of whether photography is or is not an art [she writes] is essentially a misleading one Although photography generates works that can be called art—it requires subjectivity, it can he, it gives esthetic pleasure —photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, from the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete The power of photography—and its centrahty in present esthetic concerns—is that if confirms both ideas of art But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger " When she puts it like that, Sontag is clear, original, thoughtful, and provocative Elsewhere, however, she is cryptic, or given to enthymemes "It is in the nature of a photograph that it can never entirely transcend its subject, as a painting can Nor can a photograph ever transcend the visual itself, which is in some sense the ultimate aim of modernist painting " Here, as in some other passages, Sontag gets carried away with intellectual aerobatics through staggering paradoxes, unexpected analogies, Wildean epigrams meant to encapsulate great esthetic and existential truths What is this modernist painting that aims to transcend the visual7 Minimalism, conceptual art, and a few other such desperate excesses or insufficiencies, yes, but not modermst painting tout court Similarly exaggerated—though very elegantly—is an assertion hke, "Photography conceived as social documentation was an instrument of humanism—which found slums the most enthralling of decors " In this instance the author yields to her uncritical hatred of the middle class (humanism, to her, is an "essentially middle-class attitude"), which leads her to a pohtical attack on photography that strikes me as the shakiest part of her book The idea is that a capitalist, industrial society uses photography to anesthetize people to their deprivations and exploitation by giving them the illusion of inexhaustible possessions, endless consumption, and also, even more wickedly, as a mode of surveillance "Social change is replaced by a change m images " This contradicts Sontag's earlier perception of photography as servant—though not initiator—of social reform one cannot consider Sontag's McLuhanian probes more than minor irritations when one notes how quickly they are followed by something like, "Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own " That is perfectly conceived and phrased, and for such a sentence one can forgive paragraphs of mere cleverness Consider, too, her perspicacity "The only prose that seems credible to more and more readers is not the fine writing of someone like Agee, but the raw record—edited or unedited talk into tape recorders, fragments of the integral texts of subhterary documents (court records, letters, diaries, psychiatric case histories, etc ), self-deprecatingly [sic] sloppy, often paranoid first-hand reportage There is a rancorous suspicion in America of whatever seems literary, not to mention a growing reluctance on the part of young people to read anything, even subtitles in foreign movies and copy on a record sleeve, which partly accounts for books of few words and many photographs " That is lovely But I do not believe Sontag's elaborate equation of photography with surrealism, or that "time eventually posits most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art," or, indeed, that "Today everything exists to end in a photograph " My own view of photography is that it is a para-art, one of those simplified, popular surrogates all high arts beget For music, there is pop music in all its forms, for architecture, the prefab house you yourself put together, for ballet, disco dancing, for cinema, the home movie, and so on For painting, there is photography As Sontag herself relates, Fox Talbot got the idea for photography from the camera ob-scura, "a device which projected the image but did not fix it," the image that one then traced from the projection No doubt, great photographers have wrested splendid results from this thing called photography, but even in their work we can sniff out the camera obscura, the prefabricated something, the painting by numbers On Photography is finally, I suppose, a devaluation of photography, but it is more interesting as a further elevation of Sontag the critical thinker She who once raged against interpretation and clamored for "an erotics of art," now refers in her very first paragraph to "an ethics of seeing " Though her description of photography as a "heroic copulation with the material world" may be a throwback, as are some other notions m the book, a different Sontag is clearly emerging, combining the old brilliance with new judiciousness When the fusion becomes complete, the results should be truly spectacular...