Susan Sontag, 1933-2004.

Susan Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004 from cancer, a disease she had been battling for years. Born in New York City on January 16, 1933, Sontag spent her childhood in Arizona and her adolescent years in Los Angeles. At age 15, she entered the University of California at Berkeley, transferring to the University of Chicago a year later. She studied literature, philosophy and theology at the universities of Chicago, Harvard, Paris and Oxford (England). By the late 1960s she had acquired a strong reputation as an essayist and a novelist. In the following years she would extend it to being a playwright and a film and theater director as well as a social, cultural and political critic. She served as the president of the international writers' organization PEN from 1987 to 1989. She was also a long-time human rights activist. Her voice in American cultural and intellectual life asserted itself through her contributions to various periodicals such as The Partisan Review, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Harpers'. The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. It was for this last publication that she started what was intended to be a two-part essay on photography and ultimately expanded into a collection of six essays that were published in 1977 as the book On Photography.

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A multi-talented writer and brilliant essayist, Sontag expressed herself on a variety of topics: literature, the visual arts, politics, human rights, ethics, AIDS, popular culture, war, pain, memory, disease--the human condition at large. Upon accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 2001, she stated:

The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the
truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies or misinformation.
Literature is the expression of nuance and contrariness against the
voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to
believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to help make us
see the world as it is, which is to say, full of many different claims
and parts and experiences. [...] I believe that the doctrine of
collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is
never justified, militarily or ethically. (1)

Faithful to the philosophy of famous essayists such as George Orwell, Edward Said, Albert Camus, as well as Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre (on both of whom she wrote), Sontag believed that there should not be a gap between intellectual activity, society and life at large. She applied her intellect to everything she encountered and for which she cared. All issues had to be analyzed and assessed in the light of ethics and politics. She denounced any disconnection between the two.

On Photography brought Sontag instant recognition in the visual art world as an astute, witty, insightful, critical, abrasive and even confrontational essayist. People in the field either loved the essays and book, or hated them. She left almost no stone unturned and carefully scrutinized and criticized every one that she picked up. Oscillating between revelations and caricatures, Sontag's text drew a multitude of comments and rapidly became a bestseller in the visual arts. Sontag noted, analyzed and commented on the vast impact of photography on our culture--from the years following its invention until very recently--and the way we view and interpret the world. "In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing." (2) Her loud assertions either drew applause for the sensation they were creating or outrage for the caricature they seemed to establish. Being an outsider made observations and caricatures easier for Sontag; it also denied the analyst some access to an area of knowledge that would have made some of her criticisms broader, more discriminate and relevant. "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself in a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge--and, therefore, like power." (3) To write such a statement is to deny photography, and the arts in general, what can be considered as their first goal--investigation--a path to knowing oneself and one's relationship to knowledge and the world at large, a path whose destination is never clear and never permanently reached. Sontag not only freely associated photography with "a tool of power," "voyeurism," "interference," "defense against anxiety," "possession of space," but also with "social rite" and "imaginary possession of the past." She opened her readers' eyes to the fact that "travels become a strategy for accumulating photographs," not only limiting the experience of the traveler but replacing it with an appearance of participation. According to her, the camera had become "a ray-gun," "a predatory weapon," pushing the phallic symbolism sometimes attached to it, a sexual simulacrum: "To photograph people," she said, "is to violate them." (4)

Experience and age usually bring wisdom. Fine intellectuals are often like good Bordeaux: they age well. Sontag's latest essays on specific usages of the photographic medium have been more circumspect and better informed--taking into consideration multiple points of view instead of just her visceral own--and have drawn broader positive responses. In Regarding the Pain of Others, first published as an essay in The New Yorker (December 2002) and then as a book by her faithful supporters Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2003), and in the recent article "The Photographs Are Us: On the Torture of Others" in The New York Times Magazine (May 23, 2004), Sontag once again comments on the fascination that still images, especially war images, exercise on their audiences, including herself. She ultimately analyzed them for what they are--tools in our hands--raw material that has to be processed. In her writings, issues are constantly elicited, questions provoked, such as the one she posed in The New Yorker 13 days after the events of 9/11:

A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in
Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence
and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign
policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a
smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to
bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded,
self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed
contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing
rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent
days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. (5)

NOTES

1. The New York Review of Books, Vol. 48, no. 10 (June 21, 2001).

2. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 3.

3. Ibid., p. 4.

4. Ibid., p. 14.

5. Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, Sept. 24, 2001.

BRUNO CHALIFOUR is a freelance critic and photographer, educator and PhD candidate.