Susan Sontag has returned photography to the cockpit of discussion
it occupied when the exact mechanical image loomed as a threat to
the person, to art, to the very relationship between images and
reality. The last, essentially, is Sontag's subject, approached -
after a splatter of (as yet) unsupported assertions - via
touchstone figures: writers, photographers, painters
interchangeably. (The book has no illustrations; it assumes,
reasonably enough, a common stock of photographic images.) In a
vivid, close-set argument, she traces Whitman's theme, "the
levelling of distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the
important and the trivial," through Lewis Hine and Walker Evans to
its "last sigh," the 1955 Family of Man exhibit, apex of
"sentimental humanism" - and jumps to the toast of 1972, Diane
Arbus, in whose world "everybody is an allen." But levelling down,
Arbus-like, is also "lowering the threshhold of what is terrible,"
as much modern art does, as Surrealism does systematically: "all
subjects are merely objets trouves." So we are confronted with
photography, reputedly realistic, as the art "that has best shown
how to juxtapose the sewing machine and the umbrella," and with the
photographer as "the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as
a landscape of voluptuous extremes." Beauty falls, morality falls,
as a standard; "photographic seeing" is the criterion, following
"the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting
through the camera." So photographs become - Sontag adduces a
misconstruction of Proust's - "not so much an instrument of memory
as an invention or replacement." Images, that is. Dismemberments of
reality. The Chinese want only complete, correct views, Sontag
observes in a stunning windup. For them, a "good" picture; for us,
a good picture. With an anthology of quotations (also shards of
reality) from the unlikes of Daguerre, Man Ray, and a 1976 Minolta
ad for further agitation. (Kirkus Reviews)
'The most original and illuminating study of the subject.' The New
Yorker Photographs are everywhere. From high art to family albums
to legal evidence, they capture and document the world around us.
And whether we use them to expose, reveal or remember, they hold an
enduring power. In this essential and revelatory volume, Susan
Sontag confronts important questions surrounding the power dynamics
between photographer and subject, the blurred boundary between
lived events and recreated images, and the desires that lead us to
record our lives. 'Complex and contradictory... one of America's
greatest public intellectuals' Observer 'Susan Sontag offers enough
food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites.'
The Times 'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes
photographic images have had in our way of looking at the world,
and at ourselves, over the years.' Washington Post
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