On Photography

Rating:
Summary: Tedious
Review: As a high school student in an AP English class I was assigned to read a critics book. I happened to pick this book off of the list. As I began reading it, it did not interest me at all. I found the book incredibly redundant and pointless. She also constantly used huge words, which made it even harder to read. I thought the book could have been ten pages long and covered everything.

Rating:
Summary: On Photography, On Life, by fermed
Review: Every so often one reads about tourists who are found strangled with the strap of their cameras in some obscure alleyway of Bangkok or Manila. Or New York. The camera is invariably missing, of course, and one would wish that the perpetrator had left a message on the body explaining the crime. A copy of ON PHOTOGRAPHY placed on the victim's chest would splendidly communicate most of the motivations for such murders.

People who possess even the rudiments of sensitivity become aware, without any necessary explanations, that holding a camera is not unlike holding a gun. It conveys upon the possesor raw power, whether it is wanted or not. How this power is used may result on the strangulation of the photographer.

This book, in a much more elegant way, is about such things. Its essays should be included as part of the operating instructions of all cameras sold in the US. I think that even the users of disposable cameras should read this book because it will not only improve their camera work, but their souls, also.

There are some shortcomings to the book. For one it does not have an index, a sin I find hard to forgive in any book of this nature. Nor does it contain any pictures, a most disconcerting fact. For as early as page 7 we are told that David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron were early masters of photography. Uh? Never heard of them. And so, as part of this excercise in gaining Kultur, I was forced to purchase Naomi Rosenblum's A WORLD HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY (available through Amazon[.com], naturally), a joyous addition to my book collection, and one in which I was able to find almost all of Ms. Sontag's references to photographers. Cameron and Hill were, of course, prominently discussed and their work carefully reproduced in Ms. Rosenblum's book. The two books in combination are wonderful; but, if on a budget, by all means consider that ON PHOTOGRAPHY is marvelous all by it self.

Rating:
Summary: Holding forth against the boundless ocean of unlikeness
Review: From the unforgettable opening lines, "Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, in its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth" sontag builds her case that the ubiquity of photographic images have subverted the notion that images are lesser than the reality they contain. The density of their presence among us, enabled by photography, have transformed images, particularly the photographic image, into a species of reality that actively participates and transforms what we have considered real. In these evocative highly pleasurable pages, one forgets the oddity of reading a book on photography that does not contain a single photograph. On Photography bravely sets an example for the ecological use of images.

Rating:
Summary: A classic, though somewhat dated, collection of essays
Review: I am not a big fan of artistic criticism: I often find it pretentious and prolix. Sontag's essays can be described by these adjectives, at least on first reading. I suspected that critics are inherently like this (until I read Nancy Newhall), but I reread "On Photography" recently and have changed my opinion slightly: critics can be pretentious, but that is the nature of the task.

Sontag's essays are complex and thought provoking, eliciting a flow of ideas that one needs to think about deeply: what is a photograph and how does it convey its message? How much truth does a photograph contain, if any? The answer to that last question is much more difficult with the advent of digital photography and the wonderous (or evil, depending on your viewpoint) manipulations that can be done in the digital darkroom.

An issue that isn't discussed in great depth is the relationship between candid snapshots on one end of the spectrum, and fine art photography on the other; Photography as a medium for artistic expression vs. a medium for recording reality (or unreality or surreality).

The book is not trivially understood: references to philosophy and art history abound, and a dictionary of philosophy and art is almost a requisite. You should also expect to read this a couple of times to get the full impact: do not make your judgement based on a first reading.

Rating:
Summary: good, thought provoking, but ...
Review: Imagine, a book "on photography" without even a single photograph! Well written, thought provoking, but a too little rambling for my taste. The structure of some of these loosely organized essays just eluded me. Where is she going? When did she get there, if she did indeed get there?
Also, the author assumes that the reader can instantly recall all the photographs she mentions. If some of the more important ones (by this I mean the ones she refers to most often) had been reprinted in the book, it would have made following her arguments much easier. But then, there is a certain type of intellectually-minded author who doesn't really want the reader to understand his/her book ...

Rating:
Summary: The symbiotic relationship between photography and society.
Review: It is rare to find a book on photography that is neither basic pedantry, nor a picture book. This book is for those who wish to take a wild ride upon a bucking whirlwind of a mind as it rides across the landscape of photography.

Rating:
Summary: Still pertinent and thoughtful
Review: Ms. Sontag's collection of texts (which I believe were originally published as separate newspaper articles) still offer food for thought despite their age. Her thoughts on history, current events, and the modified perception of both through the medium of photography continue to be pertinent. This is an interesting read for those unaquainted with theoretical texts, and an important reference for those with more experience.

Rating:
Summary: Still pertinent and thoughtful
Review: Ms. Sontag's collection of texts (which I believe were originally published as separate newspaper articles) still offer food for thought despite their age. Her thoughts on history, current events, and the modified perception of both through the medium of photography continue to be pertinent. This is an interesting read for those unaquainted with theoretical texts, and an important reference for those with more experience.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting look into the societal meaning of photography
Review: Photography, probably more than any other medium, is emblematic of the nature of modern Western society. Photographs are concerned chiefly with appearances, they are deceptively nuanced but essentially narrow, yet somehow they find great breadth in their mechanization and ubiquity. And, like our society, they tend towards an ultimate reduction of the dimensionality of time. Through photographs the past blends into the present, flattening into an omni-present "now" in which history loses its philosophical weight as it increases in familiarity. In a sense photographs are the ultimate invention of a humanist-capitalist society: they provide the commodification of memory itself! And like the society which originated them, they provide equal portions of help and harm, of truth and of fiction; they have undeniable value, but they also result in a certain loss of innocence, and of deeper values.

The six essays in this book (all of which were originally published in the New York Times Review of Books) provide a critical evaluation of these themes. Ms. Sontag is concerned with what she sees as the cheapening of experience that the proliferation of photographs in our society has caused. She argues that photography has enshrined a superficiality of experience and contributed to the overvaluation of appearances to a point where image has (subconsciously) replaced reality as reality. In many ways this shift in our modes of cultural perception is shattering; it is also completely inevitable and irreversible. As an example: who after seeing Ansel Adams's stunning photographs of Yosemite could help feeling slightly underwhelmed when experiencing the real thing? Certainly, Yosemite in person retains a certain cachet simply for its "bigness", but the mystique, the mysticism of the Adams photo is going to be missing from most people's experience of the real place. The image genie is out of the bottle... and Sontag is here to tell us that we have to live with the consequences of its release. On Photography is a lengthy exploration of the implications of the genie's (photography's) work on society. The book is full of insights into the meaning of an image-saturated society, but you won't find many conclusions at the end. It is, as a good work of criticism should be, a collection of numerous deep and provocative statements with few prescriptions. Sontag leaves it up to you, the reader, to sort out the pieces for yourself.

In fact, one of the things I found most interesting about the essays was that although Ms. Sontag evaluates many of these societal trends she doesn't seem to have a strictly negative response to any of them. Her attitude seems to be that if, for instance, the easy availability of images of Half Dome makes us enjoy Half Dome itself somewhat less, that rather than stopping looking at pictures of Half Dome or photographing Half Dome we should instead re-evaluate what experiencing Half Dome really means to us. Since we've invented a new society, and new ways of looking at society and nature, it's requisite upon us that we also invent new ways of understanding our experience of life and society. I actually agree with her on this: it's okay to wax nostalgic about the idyllicism of life before the advent of the image-saturation that we have today, but there's no way to go back to that idyllic society. Our time would be better spent in learning to deal with (and shape) our present society than in trying to shift back to an older, now completely lost, ideal of society.

Sontag wants photographers to reach a deeper understanding of the implications of their work. She's not asking the photographer-reader to put down his camera and take up a brush or pen instead, but she is saying that without some grasp of the meaning of photography to society photographers are not very helpful or socially desirable creatures. One of the points that she makes, touching on this, is that our traditional understanding of photography in relation to the other arts is flawed. Photography itself isn't actually an art-form, like painting or music. Or in her words, "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." Artistic photography without theme, photography without intent, is about as valuable as fiction without characters or plot. Photographers persist in photographing meaningless objects and minutiae, simply because this is what the "great" photographers have done, instead of trying to draft their own statements and follow their own visions. (Curiously, Edward Weston's photographs of his toilet are actually art; however, my pictures of my toilet would not be art, because I cannot photograph my toilet with any understanding of the meaning of these photographs, and so cannot have any pretensions towards the artistic value of these photographs.)

I believe that anyone who photographs should read this book, whether they merely take casual photos while on vacation or are pursuing photography as their career. We all need to reach an understanding of the act of picture-taking, because only with some sort of understanding can we give our work a sense of direction. And only with direction can photography become more than cultural noise, desensitizing us through over-exposure to cliches and making banalities out of the profound.

Rating:
Summary: What more can be said?
Review: Sontag is amazing. She knows what she wanst to say and develops her ideas so well. Refreshing to read an intelligent person who knows how to write too.

If you are at all interested in photography, art, modern culture, globalism, feminism, on and on, you should read this book. But be warned, it will change the way you look at and take pictures forever.