Another older piece I’m exhuming. More new shit next week.
Susan Sontag, discussing Chris Marker’s landmark short film La Jetée, wrote of the images we keep and their easy emotional connections to moments that may not have existed as we now sentimentalize them. “Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time past.
Her 1977 essay collection On Photography warns against romanticizing the medium, and so in its way does Marker’s film. It plays out in still photographs rather than the fluid cinematography of a movie camera, so we know as much or as little as our hero, the anguished research subject searching for answers amid the fragility of memory and time. In another essay anthologized in the book, Sontag takes the cultural meme of a cache of sentimental photographs and recasts them — via two greedy, mercenary “sluggish-lumpen peasants” in Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers — as a suitcase of worthless booty.
On Photography is argued sharply and delivered with a poet’s sense of economy and dazzle. It’s also incredibly cynical. Sontag shows no mercy to tourists — to her, travelers who spend vacations hunched over their cameras do it as a surrogate for the labor they feel guilty about not performing in societies obsessed with a grueling work ethic. She skewers the intentions of the Farm Securities Administration, which tasked photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans with capturing the conditions of impoverished Dustbowl-era American farmers. Sontag writes that the FSA gave its charges specific instructions on the right tone of misery to set with their subjects, and the passages in this essay suggest we view images like the one of 32-year-old migrant mother Florence Owens Thompson as propaganda rather than objective documentary.
To Sontag, the FSA project was foremost about aesthetics. It projected “a certain code,” to borrow a phrase from her “Against Interpretation.” That essay prescribed transparence, “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself,” as an antidote to emotion and meaning being forced upon an audience. To this end, a core thesis of On Photography is how the camera as a discrete mechanical instrument allows the photographer to hide behind a veil of alleged neutrality because the gear is the thing doing the documenting — and that by saying “I’m not here” you’re denying your own part in a potentially invasive, aggressive act. How does the person in front of the camera feel? Have they consented to what you’re doing?
For right now let’s assume they have. In a passing sentence in the FSA chapter, Sontag speculates about the migrant mother’s own motivations for the pose she struck and the grimace she made, but overall these essays falter when considering the full spectrum of thought processes of the people being photographed. As viewers, we may be cajoled by the photographer and/or the assigning agency to believe we’re looking at misery, and it’s true that what happens out of frame or in an unused exposure could very well be diametrically opposite in intent. A child may be smiling. A full, appetizing plate of food may be on a nearby table. But what about the shot that makes the cut? What about the inner lives of Diane Arbus‘s “freaks”? Sontag writes far more about what the freaks meant to Arbus — and what Arbus’s suicide would mean for the photographer’s critical rehabilitation — than any scenario in which the outcasts might have had the presence of mind to figure out what the deal was. The author does acknowledge the diversity of Other that comes through via Arbus’s perceived tunnel vision, that just the size and scope of her cataloguing almost normalizes what in isolation could be disturbing.
The subject is different, but the eye is always the same, so Arbus puts a frame of convention around each photo. But Sontag’s ambiguous about what’s more problematic and why: does the normalizing eye mean Arbus believes the diverse “freaks” are kind of an indistinguishable melting pot among themselves, or does it mean it’s fine if the subjects all begin to blur together for “normal” gallery-goers?
As a photographer who aspires to do meaningful work I keep Sontag’s admonishments and open-ended questions in the back of my head whenever I’m shooting something more challenging than a leaf on a tree. I’m acutely aware of the power dynamic and even the class dynamic of being the person with the camera. Now I would love a book that convinces me, in some un-careerist, un-clickbait way, that serious human-centered photojournalism does not constitute assault.
