Word: sontag
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...Perhaps Sontag's greatest insight concerns the relationship of a photograph to its own context. She comments, "as Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use--so for each photograph." She focuses attention on this use, to the immediate use--whether in a gallery or a newspaper, whether captioned or not--and to the societal use, to the time, place, and culture depicted in the photograph. She explores the different perspectives on photography held by people in the Fifties and the Seventies, explores the different reactions to photography in China and the United States. And she concludes that...
...Sontag's arguments are eloquent and stimulating, posing necessary questions about the meaning and effect of the photography boom. But there is also a disturbing sense in which Sontag is unfair to photography, a sense in which she sounds very much the New York intellectual ready to reject photography for being too popular. In a passage dripping with arrogance and elitism, she writes...
...ONLY does it bother Sontag that everybody takes pictures, it also bothers her that anything, anybody, can seem to have importance when photographed. "To photograph is to confer importance," she writes. But there is a different formulation of the relationship of photography to importance, a formulation that Sontag herself mentions at one point--namely, that photography does not confer importance, only discovers and communicates it. Between the two concepts lies a world of difference. If photography confers importance, this implies an importance inherent in the camera, rather than in the subject. It implies an already existing, hierarchical notion of what...
Perhaps most disturbing of all is the sense in which Sontag seems to resent photography because it is a non-verbal, non-intellectual process. She argues repeatedly that the photographic experience is a surface experience that cannot convey real knowledge, cannot convey real understanding. She objects to the way in which "the photographer's approach. . . is unsystematic, indeed anti-systematic." And well it may be, but systematic thinking and intellectual rigor is but one form of truth. Photography--with its episodic glimpses, its focus on a single image in a world that is blurred and rushing past--presents another form...
...mutually exclusive; in fact, they can complement one another quite nicely. Roy Stryker, the man who directed the Farm Security Administration photography project discovered as an economics professor at Columbia the effectiveness of photographs in making abstract economic concepts tangible for his students. In clear contrast to Sontag, he became convinced that "the photograph... that little rectangle, is one of the damnedest educational devices ever made." Sontag correctly argues that "photographs do not explain; they acknowledge." But this is no reason to disparage photography--understanding is impossible without acknowledgement...