Well I thought I’d start with reading the classics that comes up in everyday photography discussion. I have been advised on many accounts to read this particular the first chapter so I have done. Well Where do I start with this book, I have read chapter one ‘In Plato cave’ roughly four times now. Every time i re-read it another factor of what Susan Sontag Is ranting about sticks out more. I both agree but mainly disagree with photography and photographers in her words. She is quite arrogant in the way she writes, It is almost instantaneously clear that she dislikes photography and almost writes it off straight away ,she viciously compares photography to the act of shooting (hunting) and rape.
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
The quote above is ridiculously extreme! I’m not out to violate people when I photograph them neither are most photographers out there.
Although the whole chapter virtually, is written in a negative manner some of her points I agree with she writes that people now need photography in order to realise experiences .This theory of hers is a dated version of what I would like to talk about in my dissertation but now instead of just recording their experiences through the media of photography I would like to discuss peoples need to share bite size chunks of their everyday lives through social media. The constant need to record and share what seems to me like pointless information ie. There dinner at dinner time. Sontag argues that “ A photographed moment is a privileged moment which was chosen for cultural reason” Reading this makes me want to discuss this but bringing it into the present. Has the accessibility of photography now made everything a privileged moment or is this accessibility of “everybody being a photography” devalued photography to the point a picture of your cheese sandwich for dinner is a “privileged moment” or is what Susan Sontag dated and irrelevant ?
This is most defiantly a book I will be revisiting in the near future I have been advised to read it annually because there is so much content to the book pieces always get missed. I will defiantly be re-visiting and quoting this book for my dissertation research.
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