A new year and a new feature for obBLOGato. For the first time, instead of the occasional technical detail or contextual caption I’m trying my hand at writing on photography. A few words of warning are in order. First, this is a bit of a rant. Secondly, it’s a tirade that’s about 30 years too late against the views of writers who are dead on a subject of only academic interest. Third, it will betray my lack of familiarity with the critical terms of the debate, the fact that I’m no post-modernist and that I’ve drifted from the far left as I’ve grown older. I hope, however, that intellectually my argument will bear some weight and carry some interest.
I’ve been reading Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images by Terry Barrett. It’s written in very clear, simple language. So deceptively simple, it often points up things that go without saying – until you realize that a case is being built, brick by brick. Barrett carefully breaks down the concerns of photo criticism into their basic components almost to the point of obviousness, but along the way I have learned a great deal and been forced to confront some of my own intellectual laziness and philistinism. As deceptively simple as the writing is, the book covers a lot of ground including taxonomies of both photographs and criticism, theory and practice and I have taken some inspiration from it.
Then, reading Chapter 7 – Photography Theory yesterday morning, I came across some quotations from Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida. These are both books that I have owned but can no longer find in my library. I bought On Photography around the time it was first published when I was quite a young man but had already been an avid photographer for years. Reading it angered me. I felt that Sontag really didn’t understand photography. I wasn’t really able to articulate what she was getting wrong and I also knew she was a deeply intelligent, well read, respected critic and writer. Looking back over the years I had decided that I was probably too young, too green to understand or appreciate the types of insights she was making and that one day I would re-read the book and “get it.” And she took up with Annie Liebovitz – so how off-base could she have been about photography?
I bought Camera Lucida around the same era of my life, I think. I have little memory of it other than feeling I had not gotten much out of it of the sort of thing I wanted to learn – how to make better pictures. It seemed to me to be perfectly well meaning, nothing to argue with, but also offered nothing practical for my purposes (my purposes not being Barthes’ needless to say).
Then, in Barrett’s book, I read the following quotation from Sontag:
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.
And all of a sudden my misgivings all came back to me and I decided I may not have been such a callow youth after all. Let’s deconstruct this nonsense if just for the fun of it.
First, there is the imputation of some kind of purposeful intentionality to capitalist society, its wholly unsubstantiated requirement for “a culture based on images,” its “needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment.” Even if we were to grant that capitalist society is “a culture based on images,” which I’m not in the least inclined to, the notion that it “needs” such a culture strikes me as being the kind of pathetic fallacy that Ruskin warned of in the 19th century – an ascription of human characteristics to what could at best be described as an emergent property of a society. Nor is it clear how the culture and society came to be separate entities, one requiring the other.
Next, we have another causal leap: vast amounts of entertainment stimulate buying and buying anesthetizes the injuries of race, class and sex. These are all the sorts of commonplaces of the Left that once seemed intuitively true and that so many of us took for granted 30 years ago but which I daresay might bear some scrutiny if we are to be intellectually honest in ascribing them anything like philosophical truth value. Do vast amounts of entertainment stimulate buying? I suppose it’s arguable. Certainly much entertainment in capitalist societies includes vast amounts of advertising designed to stimulate buying but that’s not quite the same thing – advertising and entertainment while often occurring together are not the same thing, though perhaps she means that advertising images are entertaining. We can agree that consumerism can have a pathologically distracting effect; that we can be mesmerized by clever retailing – but does this really anesthetize the injuries of race? Does she really mean to suggest that oppressed blacks in America were able to ignore the pain of racism as long as they kept buying stuff? That strikes me as an insulting slur on the intelligence and awareness of the victims – another pattern we see all too often in our political discourse: the disempowering of victims by those who seek to protect them. The victims aren’t able to see and decide for themselves what their injuries are and how they’re being inflicted, so it’s up to us well-meaning intellectuals to tell them and decide the remedy for them by restricting the rights seen exercised by the powerful. This is not to say that there’s no place for regulation or that there are no victims, or that we shouldn’t engage in changing society for the better – only that we should be careful in deciding for others what their injuries and remedies are.
Also, by making this need to anesthetize social injuries a requirement of capitalist societies, Sontag implies that it is a unique characteristic of capitalist society. By which, presumably, she means that communist, socialist, mercantilist, and other types of societies have no injuries of class, race or sex – or at least none that need to be anesthetized. I’ll grant this book was written a number of decades ago, when such anti-capitalist cant was more fashionable but it’s hard to believe that a woman of Sontag’s erudition could really have believed “injuries of class, race and sex” were unique to capitalist society.
In the third sentence we learn of capitalist society’s other need: information. And here she means photographs. So, again, a great deal that we are being asked to believe is being conflated implicitly. Whereas in the previous sentence photographs are ‘entertainment’ designed to anesthetize injuries, presumably by deceit, in this sentence photographs are ‘information,’ presumably accurate and truthful, used to exploit. I have no argument with the notion that some photographs function as entertainment while others function as information. There is truthful, journalistic, documentary photography and there are other modes of photography that are meant more to entertain, such as the modes Barrett labels aesthetically evaluative or theoretical including pictorialism.
Unfortunately, Sontag doesn’t stop there. Capitalist society, she says, needs the information that photographs provide not merely to exploit natural resources but also to “increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.” Let us grant that information, including photographic information, is useful in all those pursuits (and what society would not want their government to use information to maintain order? – that’s one of the chief functions of a government as long as it doesn’t shade into Big Brotherism or totalitarianism). What irks me is the inference she begs us to draw that this is somehow singularly the mode of capitalist societies as if she had never heard of the NKVD or the Stasi or the Nazis or their use, misuse and abuse of information and photographic evidence. It seems to be taken for granted that capitalist societies are naturally inclined to make war, presumably more than other types of society, an assertion that might have been fashionable at the time this was published, but hardly passes any type of comparative historical scrutiny today. And what about “give jobs to bureaucrats?” Is she kidding? Is she unaware of the communist imperative to build bureaucracy? Is that an ill of capitalist society she truly wishes to lay at the door of photography?
Now, to be fair, there is much else in the book which I don’t remember from 30 years ago that is not comprehended in Barrett’s brief citation. And Sontag has much that is useful to say about how we look at images and how images function in society. But I think what bothers me, at base, is that her entire critique is based fundamentally on a set of a priori beliefs about capitalism that remain unexamined and the text asks us to make all sorts of brave leaps with precarious footing on these implicit assumptions.
This was, of course, the mode of Sontag’s criticism and it owes not a little to her French intellectual mentors like Roland Barthes. Here’s the quotation Barrett gives us from Camera Lucida:
In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object, but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly become a specter.
There is much to admire here. I’m sure most of us have had that strange dichotomous feeling as we sit for a picture and try to find just the right compromise between posing as we are (to be candid) and as we would like to be seen (submitting to a natural, human vanity).
And by adding to this Janus moment the photographer’s own duality of purpose, Barthes compounds the “strange action.” As we shift between these two postures, before settling into the moment ultimately imprisoned by the camera, we may well have a sensation of inauthenticity or imposture. I suppose that we might go so far as to say we feel like subjects becoming objects, though that formulation feels inauthentic to me – but to say we experience a “micro-version of death” seems to me a leap too far. Does anyone really feel like they’re suffering a little death, un petit mort as I’m amused to imagine it was rendered in the original French, at the moment of having their picture taken (anyone from a modern society, that is, who does not feel their soul is being stolen)? How is a micro-version of death like a parenthesis (except parenthetically)? Does he mean in the way that death is the closing parenthesis of a life? How has he “truly become a specter?” In the sense that he has suffered death or the sense of having two beings (the candid subject and the vain object)?
In order to make sense of the closing sentence in this quotation we are forced to make assumptions about the answers to the previous questions. And to sustain the flow of reason we are forced to do it instantly as we read – in other words we are forced to leap as nimbly as Barthes from stone to unconnected stone along the path of his argument, not stopping to consider whether we are heading in the right direction. I understand that this is a critical style, one that is particularly admired by Cartesian, hyper-rational French critics of the late 20th century but it leaves me uncomfortable and dissatisfied. It’s very clever and it has a poetic economy, arching over the lacuna between facts and fancy, compressing and conflating so as to avoid the troublesome need for reasoned argument but I find it ultimately unpersuasive. In Barthes’ case this is a minor matter – he is surely right to note the incongruity between the multiple roles we play as poser and ‘posee,’ subject and object. But in Sontag’s case I believe it is a more serious matter. She attempts to show how photography is both caused by, and an instrument of, an evil society by circular reasoning, associative leaps and assumptions.
Now Sontag has left behind a rich body of work and there is much to be lauded in it. Even On Photography, which so exercises me was an important contribution to a critical method of placing photographs in a social context and it has been grist for many mills since. And within a few pages of the quotation above, Barrett quotes Sontag again from a later New Yorker article on photography and war in which she disparages post-modernist critics for a lack of engagement – no one was more engagée than Sontag.
But there seems to me a certain sophistry to her arguments in On Photography, displaying a pyrotechnic rhetorical facility with photography and the political terms of the day that nonetheless accepts Leftist myths unexamined and unmentioned and makes dangerous logical leaps without alerting the reader to what has been assumed. Isn’t it time we re-examine a work that casts such a long shadow in the light of over thirty years distance?
End rant.
