On Photography.

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention.

- Susan Sontag 

The first sentences of Susan Sontag's "In Plato's Cave" establish the tone of moral judgment that pervades her subsequent essays on photography. Framing photography within Western philosophy, Sontag can scold with the best of Cassandras: photographers and their cronies foist images of half-truths upon us cave-dwellers, who, unregenerately, eat 'em up. Sontag can sound like Baudelaire in places, shaking her fist at the bourgeois, unpoetical sensibilities that photographic epistemology helped to enact.

The essays that eventually became On Photography (1977) had an electrifying impact upon many readers and photographers when they were first published in the early to mid-1970s. On one hand, they validated a medium that had attracted little critical, and even less theoretical attention in the United States. Here was one of New York's brightest lights writing seven lengthy essays on photography in the leading intellectual journal in the country, the New York Review of Books. Sontag helped make photography fashionable in publishing and intellectual circles, which in turn bolstered the growing popularity of the medium. One wonders, in retrospect, how many general readers got beyond the polished veneer of Sontag's essays and sensed the bite in her views.

The photographic community, however, felt the bite plainly enough. Sontag's writing was a far cry from the rhetoric that photographers and other insiders had utilized since the days of Camera Work. Post-World War II photographic writing reflected the New Criticism of I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks and others, in which photographs were taken to be self-contained icons that achieved the timelessness of other sanctified art. In both literary and photographic criticism, irony and ambiguity were highly valued. Subject matter was secondary; the process of seeing transcended that which was seen.

In the 1960s, John Szarkowski's writing attracted many art photographers and educators, both because it provided useful handles for discussing specific images and valorized the auteur status of the photographer. Similarly, the photographer-writers gathered together in Nathan Lyons's Photographers on Photography (1966) discussed their craft in ways that were largely indistinguishable from how Modernist painters and sculptors talked about theirs. In general, the writings of photographers, critics and historians like Beaumont Newhall told a story of heroism, as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and others fought the good fight for photography's status as art, while the likes of W. Eugene Smith and Robert Frank fought different, but related, battles against "the system." Much insider photographic writing avoided the issues that Sontag raised in her essays - the paradoxes of photographic practice and meaning, the responsibility and ethics of photographers and the mixed blessings that this technology had conferred upon society.

Accordingly, it was not surprising that the reviews of On Photography were pervasively negative. In playing the provocateur, Sontag made sweeping pronouncements about an enormous and ungainly medium, and too often they didn't hold water. Her style relied more on unquestioning pronouncements than sustained argument, and this, combined with her position outside the photographic community, created in some photographers and reviewers a curious stew of sour grapes, xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. More substantively, her insistence that photographic meaning derived more from the world reflected in images than from its formal elements challenged the operative interpretive conventions within the photographic community, while privileging painting and literature.

But it was Sontag's repeated insistence that photographers were "predatory" and "appropriative" that incited most of the passion, since these charges impugned the motives and actions of photographers while denigrating the images they made. While my photographs were nothing like those of Weegee or Arbus, I nonetheless began to consider my motives. Did my outwardly placid images mask an inner voracity? need for control? rage for order? When I posed models, was I trying to possess them? Was I subjecting them to my own private realities and dreams, thereby draining them of theirs? Was I violating their trust? And once these photographs were exhibited - whether on a gallery wall or in a publication - would they be seen and understood by viewers in ways that traduced my intentions as well as the lives and events depicted in the photographs? Not all of these questions were explicitly raised by Sontag, but they grew out of my reading of her essays. Accordingly, I was inwardly motivated to find flies in the ointment of her arguments in order to dismiss much of what she said. This rejection was theory put to the service of self-interest, since denial seemed preferable to some of the alternatives, including the possibility of my cameras taking up permanent residence behind the shoes in the closet.

When the reviews of On Photography began to appear, I sensed in some of them a defensiveness that was all too familiar. This perception, not without irony, led me to reconsider my own earlier reaction. The issues that Sontag posed struck me as fundamentally important and I feared that in trying to avoid them - much as I had - the photographic community risked the larger consequences of self-imposed myopia. It was time that photographers and photography-lovers confronted these issues head-on.

To be sure, since the early 1970s the state of critical and theoretical writing has come a long way, as measured by the photographic criticism that has appeared in Art Forum, October and other venues, including this one. Much of this criticism was prompted by Sontag, along with Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, all of whom were largely unknown to the American photographic community when Sontag's essays first appeared. But despite the significant advances that photographic criticism can claim in the last 20 plus years, our citizens remain, in large measure, illiterate about the patterns of meaning and consumption that photographs help to perpetuate. As I write, newspapers around the world are filled with editorials on the paparazzi, the editors that publish their images and the readers who voraciously consume them. In the process, of course, people continue to shell out the bucks that keep the system humming. Our age of hyper-celebrity - underscored and underwritten by our photo-saturated ways of knowing - has borne out many of Sontag's grimmer implications.

RELATED ARTICLE: QUOTATIONS FROM REVIEWS OF ON PHOTOGRAPHY (1977)

From William H. Gass, "A Different Kind of Art," New York Times Book Review, Dec. 18, 1977:

"No simple summary of the views contained in Susan Sontag's brief but brilliant work on photography is possible, first because there are too many, and second because the book is a thoughtful meditation, not a treatise, and its ideas are group more nearly like a gang of keys upon a ring than a run of onions on a string" (p.7).

From Michael Lesy, "An Unacknowledged Autobiography," Afferimate 5, no. 7 (January 1978):

"This is not a book of primary research, but rather a series of inventive, witty, and perversely whimsical suppositions and intuitions, based on second-hand reports, brought by a messenger from the outside world" (p. 5).

From Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Against Photography," New Yor Times, November 17, 1977.

"To the extent that an art fails, the civilization that produced it fails. So for her [Sontag] the failure of photography as an art form amounts not just to the failure of a technical experiment; it reflects what is wrong with industrial society."

"Argue with Sontag if you will. But know that she has made a powerful and complex case against photography" (p. 37).

From Alfred Kazin, "Sontag is Not a Camera," Esquire, February 1978.

"[Susan] Sontag is s much a theorist and what Europeans call a cafe intellectual - lots of opinions about everything - that her book adds up to a series of epigrams about the widest possible significance of photography in our photo-crowded world" (p. 50).

"Sontag is a prisoner of literary chic. Social reality seems to her a symbol in the mind of some gifted artist, writer, photographer. On Photography comes out of literature, not the naked world that is still there for you and me to look at as we damn please" (p. 51).

From Cornell Capa, letter to the field, March 11, 1978:

"As a photographer and director of the International Center of Photography, I wish to thank Susan Sontag for having reawakened the thinking process in On Photography, of who we are, what we are and what is the value of what we do."

"The essays bound into the same volume were obviously written spanning a period of several years and they remain separate pieces, some contradicting those written at an earlier time. However, the whole volume shakes from anger and frustration. It tries to wake us up to the fact that 150 years after photography's discovery, we still do not know the power and the failure of what we have."

"It is instructive and exciting to note the ripples of the earthquake that Sontag's book cause ... To date, photographers have either ignored the book, denied having read it, or are furious about personal implications that they resent."

From Michael Starenko, "On On Photography," New Art Examiner Vol. 5, no. 7 (april 1978):

"To put it much too crudely, the unrelenting polemic; the great number of apparently contradictory intellectual shifts; the obvious departures from common sense logic - the form - this then is the 'message' of On Photography. Any photography critic (or any critic, for that matter) could attempt to explain the contradictions of a photography-world which contains such elements as photographed pornography, wedding rituals, Harry Callahan, Les Krims, or Popular Photography. While reading On Photography we experience these contradictions immediately, vividly, and without external mediation" (p. 12).

From Colin l. Westerbeck Jr., "On Sontag," Artforum Vol. 16, no. 8 (April 1978):

"Susan Sontag's On Photography might have been called Off Photography, for 'offing,' in the '60s sense of committing murder, is what the book really intends to do" (p. 56).

"What lies behind the book is finally something she takes more personally than a subject for criticism ought to be taken something about photography that she does not contemplate with disinterest, something irrational in herself" (p. 60).

From Douglas Davis, "Kicking the Image Habit," Newsweek, December 5, 1977:

"'On Photography'" overstates its ease because the book is really about a world polluted, as Sontag sees it, by images, cars, poisoned air, poisoned water - the detritus of an industrialism gone mad, destroying man's old links to nature and himself. 'So many things in modern life conspire to dis-associate us from ourselves,' she says. 'I'm not against images. I just want to open this case out.' That she has done so is the great virtu of this passionate, flawed book. The sins she perceives in photography lie elsewhere, in the entire culture, in the moving image that is film and television, as well as in the still image. But even as she denounces it, she raises photography to a new level of seriousness. After Sontag, photography must be written about not only as a force in the arts, but as one that is increasingly powerful in the nature and destiny of our global society" (p. 100).

From Robert Hughes, "A Tourist in Other People's Reality," Time, December 26, 1977.

"It is hard to imagine any photographer's agreeing point for point with Sontag's polemic. But it is a brilliant, irritating performance, and it opens window after window on one of the great faits accomplis of our culture. Not many photographers are worth a thousand of her words" (p. 66).

Choice, September 19, 1978.

"In the course of pointing out the essentially surrealistic nature of photography, Sontag raises a number of questions, both moral and aesthetic, that will remain controversial. Though there are no illustrations, no sustained discussions of particular photographers or their work (with the exception of Diane Arbus), no critical paradigms, this volume raises issues important to photographers and students of photography. Recommended to all levels of libraries" (p. 854).

DAVID L. JACOBS is Professor of Art at the University of Houston.