Deep Dive: what and why we photograph
a student’s one-sided discussion on Susan Sontag’s chapter titled Plato’s Cave in her book On Photography.
…we can hold the whole world in our heads — as an anthology of images.
“Photographs are experiences captured.” Photographs are slices of time, they’re a single frame, and inherently different from video. Video captures more than one frame, there is more context, there may even be sound to give clues. A photo is still, its arranged or framed to show what the photographer envisions.
What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
“ Photographs furnish evidence.” While the intent of some photos is to capture the truth of what's happening or what's visible. There is always a certain a mount of framing happening, both technical choosing of what is important to include, but also framing the perception or the context of a photo, done by the photographer. No matter how true an image is, there's always the photographers influence.
In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.
“Photographs are a social rite”, capturing individuals or groups achievements. Photographs have become a normal part of life, or family gatherings, of events with friends. We have placed taking a photo at the core of multiple life events, graduation, marriage, birth, even birthdays and holidays. This is a bit of photography being a record, but mostly it being a social rite, its what we do. How often do we look at these photos? We take these photos for our future selves to remember the past, or for our families to remember us.
“Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” Sontag makes a great point, and in today’s world, not only is photography way more accessible, but so ingrained in anything. Instagram, social media, we have to display we did the thing, we bought the thing, and even we look the way everyone wants. We now see this thing (I’m hesitant to call it a trend) where people take a lot of videos or pictures at events like concerts, and there's the antithesis of this, which is to go to a concert and refuse to take any pictures, they’re never good photos, we never watch the awful sounding videos. Why do we feel the need to document these things? We might be valuing the collection of photos over the photos themselves. In this sense, these images taken while on vacation, at hot tourist spots, at concerts, they become souvenirs.
“Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention.” Some images in National Geographic (at least in the early 2000’s when I had access to lots of National Geographic magazines) where images were of suffering. I often think about the act of taking a photo to document and spread awareness versus being the one to intervene in the suffering or atrocity. While there should be a healthy sense of knowing when to keep yourself safe, it is often hard to make that decision to be unsafe for the sake of another safety. I often think about videos and pictures from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and marches that devolved into chaos for a myriad of reasons. There was so much danger in those crowds, and stepping into a situation to save or help someone, could’ve very well gotten you in need of help or saving. We as humans need to be aware of what we can do to help, before we step into the role of documenting. Are we garnering attention or are we desensitizing the public with photos of atrocity?
This chapter from Susan Sontag is a bit of a downer. She touches on some negative points of photography, and while those are valid and even true, there is also beauty and necessity in photography. Photography is good and necessary for documentation, for education, and for familial recording. We as society benefit not only from historical or documentation photography, but also from art photography, just like we benefit from more than just portraiture paintings.
