Authors: Susan Sontag
As the vehicle of a certain reaction against the conventionally beautiful, photography has served to enlarge vastly our notion of what is aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes this reaction is in the name of truth. Sometimes it is in the name of sophistication or of prettier lies: thus, fashion photography has been developing, over more than a decade, a repertoire of paroxysmic gestures that shows the unmistakable influence of Surrealism. (“Beauty will be
convulsive,”
Breton wrote, “or it will not be at all.”) Even the most compassionate photojournalism is under pressure to satisfy simultaneously two sorts of expectations, those arising from our largely surrealist way of looking at all photographs, and those created by our belief that some photographs give real and important information about the world. The photographs that
W. Eugene Smith took in the late 1960s in the Japanese fishing village of Minamata, most of whose inhabitants are crippled and slowly dying of mercury poisoning, move us because they document a suffering which arouses our indignation—and distance us because they are superb photographs of Agony, conforming to surrealist standards of beauty. Smith’s photograph of a dying girl writhing on her mother’s lap is a Pieta for the world of plague victims which Artaud invokes as the true subject of modern dramaturgy; indeed, the whole series of photographs are possible images for Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty.
Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith’s Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a general news magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each of these situations suggests a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning. As Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning
is
the use—so for each photograph. And it is in this way that the presence and proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of the very notion of meaning, to that parceling out of the truth into relative truths which is taken for granted by the modern liberal consciousness.
Socially concerned photographers assume that their work can convey some kind of stable meaning, can reveal truth. But partly because the photograph is, always, an object in a context, this meaning is bound to drain away; that is, the context which shapes whatever immediate—in particular, political—uses the photograph may have is inevitably succeeded by contexts in which such uses are weakened and become progressively less relevant. One of the central characteristics of photography is that process by which original uses are modified, eventually supplanted by subsequent uses—most notably, by the discourse of art into which any photograph can be absorbed. And, being images themselves, some photographs right from the start refer us to other images as well as to life. The photograph that the Bolivian authorities transmitted to the world press in October 1967 of Che Guevara’s body, laid out in a stable on a stretcher on top of a cement trough, surrounded by a Bolivian colonel, a U.S. intelligence agent, and several journalists and soldiers, not only summed up the bitter realities of contemporary Latin American history but had some inadvertent resemblance, as John Berger has pointed out, to Mantegna’s “The Dead Christ” and Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp.” What is compelling about the photograph partly derives from what it shares, as a composition, with these paintings. Indeed, the very extent to which that photograph is unforgettable indicates its potential for being depoliticized, for becoming a timeless image.
The best writing on photography has been by moralists—Marxists or would-be Marxists—hooked on photographs but troubled by the way photography inexorably beautifies. As Walter Benjamin observed in 1934, in an address delivered in Paris at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, the camera
“is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can only say, ‘How beautiful.’.It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment.
”
Moralists who love photographs always hope that words will save the picture. (The opposite approach to that of the museum curator who, in order to turn a photojournalist’s work into art, shows the photographs without their original captions.) Thus, Benjamin thought that the right caption beneath a picture could “rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.” He urged that writers start taking photographs, to show the way.
Socially concerned writers have not taken to cameras, but they are often enlisted, or volunteer, to spell out the truth to which photographs testify—as James Agee did in the texts he wrote to accompany Walker Evans’s photographs in
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
or as John Berger did in his essay on the photograph of the dead Che Guevara, this essay being in effect an extended caption, one that attempts to firm up the political associations and moral meaning of a photograph that Berger found too satisfying aesthetically, too suggestive iconographically. Godard and Gorin’s short film A
Letter to Jane
(1972) amounts to a kind of counter-caption to a photograph—a mordant criticism of a photograph of Jane Fonda taken during a visit to North Vietnam. (The film is also a model lesson on how to read any photograph, how to decipher the un-innocent nature of a photograph’s framing, angle, focus.) What the photograph—it shows Fonda listening with an expression of distress and compassion as an unidentified Vietnamese describes the ravages of American bombing—meant when it was published in the French picture magazine
L’Express
in some ways reverses the meaning it had for the North Vietnamese, who released it. But even more decisive than how the photograph was changed by its new setting is how its revolutionary use-value to the North Vietnamese was sabotaged by what
L’Express
furnished as a caption. “This photograph, like any photograph,” Godard and Gorin point out, “is physically mute. It talks through the mouth of the text written beneath it.” In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture’s meaning.
What the moralists are demanding from a photograph is that it do what no photograph can ever do—speak. The caption is the missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth. But even an entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached. And the caption-glove slips on and off so easily. It cannot prevent any argument or moral plea which a photograph (or set of photographs) is intended to support from being undermined by the plurality of meanings that every photograph carries, or from being qualified by the acquisitive mentality implicit in all picture-taking—and picture-collecting—and by the aesthetic relation to their subjects which all photographs inevitably propose.
Even those photographs which speak so laceratingly of a specific historical moment also give us vicarious possession of their subjects under the aspect of a kind of eternity: the beautiful. The photograph of Che Guevara is finally…beautiful, as was the man. So are the people of Minamata. So is the small Jewish boy photographed in 1943 during a round-up in the Warsaw Ghetto, his arms raised, solemn with terror—whose picture the mute heroine of Bergman’s
Persona
has brought with her to the mental hospital to meditate on, as a photo-souvenir of the essence of tragedy.
In a consumer society, even the most well-intentioned and properly captioned work of photographers issues in the discovery of beauty. The lovely composition and elegant perspective of Lewis Hine’s photographs of exploited children in turn-of-the-century American mills and mines easily outlast the relevance of their subject matter. Protected middle-class inhabitants of the more affluent corners of the world—those regions where most photographs are taken and consumed—learn about the world’s horrors mainly through the camera: photographs can and do distress. But the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it. Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle. As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions. Photography’s realism creates a confusion about the real which is (in the long run) analgesic morally as well as (both in the long and in the short run) sensorially stimulating. Hence, it clears our eyes. This is the fresh vision everyone has been talking about.
Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation. Through the camera people become customers or tourists of reality—or
Realties,
as the name of the French photo-magazine suggests, for reality is understood as plural, fascinating, and up for grabs. Bringing the exotic near, rendering the familiar and homely exotic, photographs make the entire world available as an object of appraisal. For photographers who are not confined to projecting their own obsessions, there are arresting moments, beautiful subjects everywhere. The most heterogeneous subjects are then brought together in the fictive unity offered by the ideology of humanism. Thus, according to one critic, the greatness of Paul Strand's pictures from the last period of his life—when he turned from the brilliant discoveries of the abstracting eye to the touristic, world-anthologizing tasks of photography—consists in the fact that “his people, whether Bowery derelict, Mexican peon, New England farmer, Italian peasant, French artisan, Breton or Hebrides fisherman, Egyptian fellahin, the village idiot or the great Picasso, are all touched by the same heroic quality—humanity.” What is this humanity? It is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs.
The urge to take photographs is in principle an indiscriminate one, for the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera. But this quality of being interesting, like that of manifesting humanity, is an empty one. The photographic purchase on the world, with its limitless production of notes on reality, makes everything homologous. Photography is no less reductive when it is being reportorial than when it reveals beautiful forms. By disclosing the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things, photography transforms reality into a tautology. When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Photographs are often invoked as an aid to understanding and tolerance. In humanist jargon, the highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man. But photographs do not explain; they acknowledge. Robert Frank was only being honest when he declared that “to produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation.” If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” as Arbus observed. “The more it tells you the less you know.” Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
The force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces. This freezing of time—the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph—has produced new and more inclusive canons of beauty. But the truths that can be rendered in a dissociated moment, however significant or decisive, have a very narrow relation to the needs of understanding. Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera's ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth. The reason that humanism has become the reigning ideology of ambitious professional photographers—displacing formalist justifications of their quest for beauty—is that it masks the confusions about truth and beauty underlying the photographic enterprise.
The restriction of photography to impersonal seeing has of course continued to have its advocates. Among the Surrealists, photography was thought to be liberating to the extent that it transcended mere personal expression: Breton starts his essay of 1920 on Max Ernst by calling the practice of automatic writing “a true photography of thought,” the camera being regarded as “a blind instrument” whose superiority in “the imitation of appearances” had “dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as poetry.” In the opposing aesthetic camp, the Bauhaus theoreticians took a not dissimilar view, treating photography as a branch of design, like architecture—creative but impersonal, unencumbered by such vanities as the painterly surface, the personal touch. In his book
Painting, Photography, Film
(1925) Moholy-Nagy praises the camera for imposing “the hygiene of the optical,” which will eventually “abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern…which has been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters.”
The large influence that photography exercised upon the Impressionists is a commonplace of art history. Indeed, it is not much of an exaggeration to say, as Stieglitz does, that “the impressionist painters adhere to a style of composition that is strictly photographic.” The camera’s translation of reality into highly polarized areas of light and dark, the free or arbitrary cropping of the image in photographs, the indifference of photographers to making space, particularly background space, intelligible—these were the main inspiration for the Impressionist painters’ professions of scientific interest in the properties of light, for their experiments in flattened perspective and unfamiliar angles and decentralized forms that are sliced off by the picture’s edge. (“They depict life in scraps and fragments,” as Stieglitz observed in 1909.) A historical detail: the very first Impressionist exhibition, in April 1874, was held in Nadar’s photography studio on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris.