Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
I came to realize that I wasn’t writing about photography so much as I was writing about modernity, about the way we are now. The subject of photography is a form of access to contemporary ways of feeling and thinking.
Photography is seen as an acute manifestation of the individualized “I,” the homeless private self astray in an
overwhelming world—mastering reality by a fast visual anthologizing of it. Or photography is seen as a means
of finding a place in the world (still experienced as overwhelming, alien) by being able to relate to it with
detachment—bypassing the interfering, insolent claims of the self.
While there appears to be nothing that photography can’t devour, whatever can’t be photographed becomes less important.
To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment... It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.
Though people have always seen, now there is a process of framing or selection which is guided by the kinds of things that we see reproduced.
...the most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is—beauty.
... the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art—it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure—photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence is seen as good entertainment, fun…. What is illustrated by these photographs [from Abu Ghraib] is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.
