Susan Sontag, an American writer, critic and novelist; in the book of On a photography, 1974, interestingly has not a single photograph but yet descriptive paragraphs representing the photograph. The book is contextualised into six main essays focusing on how the role of photography plays in the modern society.
Positing the idea that war and peace changed; peace is now considered the norm rather than the exception. She sees the history of war as a male-dominated affair, recorded by pitiless artistry intent on capturing the savagery of battle.Regarding the Pain of Others - Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis (2019) Available at: http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-regarding-the-pain-of-others/chapanal006.html#gsc.tab=0 (Accessed: 27 March 2019). Sontag actively wrote about themes of conflict during the war of Vietnam and Siege of Sarajevo. Sontag also wrote the history of photography, the media and culture, and sometimes her essay hinted controversy. Sontag wrote ‘On a photography’ in 1977, during this era the art world had new movements arising like Photo-realism and Art language. Sontag looks at the harsh realities of war, and the at the pain of others. Specifically, Sontag looks at the photographs of war from her era (1960’s). Surprisingly was a shock to see such images of pain of the real horror. How can one go through such terror? The photographer has the decision to either capture the harsh reality of the moment or to actually help the situation. As a viewer you automatically connect to the events that have taken place, although it is not our personal experience, we emphasise with the pain. The viewer feels powerless as they cannot change what they’ve seen, they become immune to the images of the suffering. Sontag offers comfort by offering just descriptive narratives of the events instead of the physical image. The human figure becomes objectified by the predator of the camera; the viewer knows them differently to the way they know themselves. The subject (the human) is unaware (in some cases) that they are being photographed. “The photos reality is in the eyes of the spectator, the subject does not ‘seek our gaze’, quite the reverse: it is the spectator who must meet their gaze and react to it”. Sontag also looks at the psychological motives of the act of taking photographs; this is associated with the uniqueness that each individual photograph holds that then evokes emotion. Our culture has certainly had some impact in the way we understand the photograph. Closure is one element that is trigged when we reconnect with an image from the past; in our head we almost lose the information from the photograph, so we instantly fill in the spaces of memories. Photographs in themselves have sufficient information to supply knowledge and power. There is also the dispute of the information provided in a photograph, how reliable is it truly? With all the new technology, photographs can be manipulated, cropped or re-adjusted. Sontag describes our photographic world as the ‘image world’, embracing images as it is a realistic representation of reality. “Sees in photography a fixed ‘trace’ of the human memory removed from the flow of appearances” Photographs inform us of things we might not have seen before (in the physical). For example: the moon. Images of space, so therefore we have some sort of knowledge of what it might look like (although we have never physically witnessed it for ourselves), we have a limited experience of a truthful representation. You can almost say that war photographs were used as evidence of what was a moment – society use it as a reliable source, as a witness. “Photographers don’t record the world, they interpret it”. Cropping and manipulating to adjust till we are truly satisfied with the image. We have the tendency to ‘act’ to photograph; doing things specifically, just to have them documented. “While an utopic fantasy escape sounds wonderful, how do you photograph something that doesn’t exist in real life? How do you give that natural world a psychedelic twist? The answer, for some, is to create amazing images by mixing photography with digital art in Photoshop. But many others use age-old, traditional tricks to create a surreal world in front of the lens and only minimal digital manipulation.” Grigonis, Hillary (July 2018) Creative Reality: How to Photograph Worlds That Don't Look Like Our Own. Available at: https://www.creativelive.com/blog/creative-reality-photography/ (Accessed: 26 March 2019). Photo-realism, occurred in the late 1960’s, early 1970’s. The movement was based on studying a photograph, then attempt to reproduce the exact image but in a different medium. The development of photography during the 90’s had a major impact on the art world. The expansion of photo-realism allowed artists to experiment further. But truth is, arose as to whether photography was still considered as Fine Art. It was completely different to what was the traditional methods of producing art (oil paint on canvas). According to Sontag (1978, p.9) “Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty”. The medium photograph has been defined as beautiful. The desire to photograph the beautiful moments. And wanting to present the better (best) version of things. The sensible modern is associated with beauty and photography, when we glance at something that is beautiful, we have the tendency to want to photograph it. From an image, we base our understanding of what is reality. Lule, Jack (2015) On Reading“On Photography”, Chapter 6. Available at: https://medium.com/@jacklule/on-reading-on-photography-chapter-6-308a538fd90c(Accessed: 28 February 2019).
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