Although Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovtiz were famously romantically involved towards the end of the former’s life, the essays in this collection were written before the pair met, which leaves the fascinating question of how intimacy with one of the world’s most famous practitioners of the art modulated Sontag’s views, if at all.
As they are, Sontag veers between the wilfully obfuscated prose that academics love and the statement of complete banalities presented as riveting insight.
The best and in many ways the most modern of the essays is the first, In Plato’s Cave, and again it’s fascinating to know what Sontag would have made of the ubiquitous camera phone, or indeed digital photography itself. She predicts many of the effects of the new technologies, in language that at the time of writing must have seemed pretty extreme, and she correctly anticipates the pervasive use of photographic technologies by the governments of supposedly free countries, a phenomenon that she predicted would be less likely in repressive regimes (the former East Germany is a very powerful counterargument, mind you).
Writing at the time of Watergate and the classic surveillance films such as The Conversation and The Anderson Tapes that it inspired, Sontag was not necessarily eerily prescient, but that doesn’t make it any more interesting to see what amounted to a society’s worst fears become an on the whole benign reality.
Unfortunately the essays don’t sustain this level of interest, and now seem rather quaintly dated. Couched as they are in the absurd social science academic discourse of the time (not that the academic discourse of the social sciences has become any less absurd, it has merely turned its attention to other, equally risible navel gasing). Here’s an example:
By disclosing the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things, photography transforms reality into a tautology. When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
If you’re not careful, you can be seduced by sentences like these into believing that they make some sense, and this is surely the reason that so much philosophical writing is couched in these terms; far from seeking precision as they should, in fact they seek only to blind with pseudoscience. Examined in any detail at all they fall apart. Was it really photography that exposed the ‘thingness of human beings’, or the simple common sense of millennia? Are things (say a stone) really human? Isn’t Sontag’s observation about reality becoming a tautology the wrong way around; if all they are is a reproduction of reality, what function do they serve? And the sentence about Cartier-Bresson in China is simply completely redundant and laughable. Do obvious things like this need to be stated even in a book for children, never mind dressed up as some profound intellectual insight?
The day after I finished reading On Photography I went to the Pompidou Centre and there saw some of Diane Arbus’s work, which Sontag discusses in some detail. My feeling was that she had expended a great deal of verbiage in order to completely miss the point. They are remarkable to look at (as Sontag says, they are frequently images of ‘freaks’) and beautiful, but they are still merely images. They do not present more than a fraction of a profound insight into the world, except to point out that to be human is a mystery and that people are strange. Not to be sniffed at, but not to be overstated, either.
Any idiot knows that the camera can only lie; a great photograph is a point of view. What makes it remarkable is that it can lie about details in order to enlighten us about central truths, that war is vicious and indiscriminate, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that nature is strange, beautiful and full of majesty, and it can propose an aesthetic interpretation of the world that is unique to every practitioner. This is what distinguishes great photography from everyday snapshots, just as it is what separates the average Tumbr blog from great literature. In both cases, we know it when we see it. The pretensions of academics don’t really help.
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