Authors: Susan Sontag
An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals—assault on reality and submission to reality—is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography’s
means.
Whatever the claims for photography as a form of personal expression on a par with painting, it remains true that its originality is inextricably linked to the powers of the machine: no one can deny the informativeness and formal beauty of many photographs made possible by the steady growth of these powers, like Harold Edgerton’s high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target, of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke, or Lennart Nilsson’s endoscopic photographs of the interior of the human body. But as cameras get ever more sophisticated, more automated, more acute, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are really not armed, and prefer to submit themselves to the limits imposed by a pre-modern camera technology—a cruder, less high-powered machine being thought to give more interesting or expressive results, to leave more room for the creative accident. Not using fancy equipment has been a point of honor for many photographers—including Weston, Brandt, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Frank—some sticking with a battered camera of simple design and slow lens that they acquired early in their careers, some continuing to make their contact prints with nothing more elaborate than a few trays, a bottle of developer, and a bottle of hypo solution.
The camera is indeed the instrument of “fast seeing,” as one confident modernist, Alvin Langdon Coburn, declared in 1918, echoing the Futurist apotheosis of machines and speed. Photography's present mood of doubt can be gauged by Cartier-Bresson’s recent statement that it may be
too
fast. The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates with the wish to return to a more artisanal, purer past—when images still had a handmade quality, an aura. This nostalgia for some pristine state of the photographic enterprise underlies the current enthusiasm for daguerreotypes, stereograph cards, photographic
cartes de visite,
family snapshots, the work of forgotten nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century provincial and commercial photographers.
But the reluctance to use the newest high-powered equipment is not the only or indeed the most interesting way in which photographers express their attraction to photography’s past. The primitivist hankerings that inform current photographic taste are actually being aided by the ceaseless innovativeness of camera technology. For many of these advances not only enlarge the camera’s powers but also recapitulate—in a more ingenious, less cumbersome form—earlier, discarded possibilities of the medium. Thus, the development of photography hinges on the replacement of the daguerreotype process, direct positives on metal plates, by the positive-negative process, whereby from an original (negative) an unlimited number of prints (positives) can be made. (Although invented simultaneously in the late 1830s, it was Daguerre’s government-supported invention, announced in 1839 with great publicity, rather than Fox Talbot’s positive-negative process, that was the first photographic process in general use.) But now the camera could be said to be turning back upon itself. The Polaroid camera revives the principle of the daguerreotype camera: each print is a unique object. The hologram (a three-dimensional image created with laser light) could be considered a variant on the heliogram—the first, cameraless photographs made in the 1820s by Nicephore Niepce. And the increasingly popular use of the camera to produce slides—images which cannot be displayed permanently or stored in wallets and albums, but can only be projected on walls or on paper (as aids for drawing)—goes back even further into the camera’s pre-history, for it amounts to using the photographic camera to do the work of the camera obscura.
“History is pushing us to the brink of a realistic age,” according to Abbott, who summons photographers to make the jump themselves. But while photographers are perpetually urging each other to be bolder, a doubt persists about the value of realism which keeps them oscillating between simplicity and irony, between insisting on control and cultivating the unexpected, between the eagerness to take advantage of the complex evolution of the medium and the wish to reinvent photography from scratch. Photographers seem to need periodically to resist their own knowingness and to remystify what they do.
Questions about knowledge are not, historically, photography’s first line of defense. The earliest controversies center on the question of whether photography’s fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine did not prevent it from being a fine art—as distinct from a merely practical art, an arm of science, and a trade. (That photographs give useful and often startling kinds of information was obvious from the beginning. Photographers only started worrying about what they knew, and what kind of knowledge in a deeper sense a photograph supplies,
after
photography was accepted as an art.) For about a century the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was a vanguard revolt against ordinary standards of seeing, no less worthy an art than painting.
Now photographers are choosier about the claims they make. Since photography has become so entirely respectable as a branch of the fine arts, they no longer seek the shelter that the notion of art has intermittently given the photographic enterprise. For all the important American photographers who have proudly identified their work with the aims of art (like Stieglitz, White, Siskind, Callahan, Lange, Laughlin), there are many more who disavow the question itself. Whether or not the camera’s “results come under the category of Art is irrelevant,” Strand wrote in the 1920s; and Moholy-Nagy declared it “quite unimportant whether photography produces ‘art’ or not.” Photographers who came to maturity in the 1940s or later are bolder, openly snubbing art, equating art with artiness. They generally claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing, exploring themselves—anything but making works of art. At first, it was photography’s commitment to realism that placed it in a permanently ambivalent relation to art; now it is its modernist heritage. The fact that important photographers are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their work is
not
involved with art, shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art. And modernist taste has welcomed this unpretentious activity that can be consumed, almost in spite of itself, as high art.
Even in the nineteenth century, when photography was thought to be so evidently in need of defense as a fine art, the line of defense was far from stable. Julia Margaret Cameron’s claim that photography qualifies as an art because, like painting, it seeks the beautiful was succeeded by Henry Peach Robinson’s Wildean claim that photography is an art because it can lie. In the early twentieth century Alvin Langdon Coburn’s praise of photography as “the most modern of the arts,” because it is a fast, impersonal way of seeing, competed with Weston’s praise of photography as a new means of individual visual creation. In recent decades the notion of art has been exhausted as an instrument of polemic; indeed, a good part of the immense prestige that photography has acquired as an art form comes from its declared ambivalence toward being an art. When photographers now deny that they are making works of art, it is because they think they are doing something better than that. Their disclaimers tell us more about the harried status of any notion of art than about whether photography is or isn't one.
Despite the efforts of contemporary photographers to exorcise the specter of art, something lingers. For instance, when professionals object to having their photographs printed to the edge of the page in books or magazines, they are invoking the model inherited from another art: as paintings are put in frames, photographs should be framed in white space. Another instance: many photographers continue to prefer black-and-white images, which are felt to be more tactful, more decorous than color—or less voyeuristic and less sentimental or crudely lifelike. But the real basis for this preference is, once again, an implicit comparison with painting. In the introduction to his book of photographs
The Decisive Moment
(1952), Cartier-Bresson justified his unwillingness to use color by citing technical limitations: the slow speed of color film, which reduces the depth of focus. But with the rapid progress in color-film technology during the last two decades, making possible all the tonal subtlety and high resolution one might desire, Cartier-Bresson has had to shift his ground, and now proposes that photographers renounce color as a matter of principle. In Cartier-Bresson’s version of that persistent myth according to which—following the camera’s invention—a division of territory took place between photography and painting, color belongs to painting. He enjoins photographers to resist temptation and keep up their side of the bargain.
Those still involved in defining photography as an art are always trying to hold some line. But it is impossible to hold the line: any attempt to restrict photography to certain subjects or certain techniques, however fruitful these have proved to be, is bound to be challenged and to collapse. For it is in the very nature of photography that it be a promiscuous form of seeing, and, in talented hands, an infallible medium of creation. (As John Szarkowski observes, “a skillful photographer can photograph anything well.”) Hence, its longstanding quarrel with art, which (until recently) meant the results of a discriminating or purified way of seeing, and a medium of creation governed by standards that make genuine achievement a rarity. Understandably, photographers have been reluctant to give up the attempt to define more narrowly what good photography is. The history of photography is punctuated by a series of dualistic controversies—such as the straight print versus the doctored print, pictorial photography versus documentary photography—each of which is a different form of the debate about photography's relation to art: how close it can get while still retaining its claim to unlimited visual acquisition. Recently, it has become common to maintain that all these controversies are now outmoded, which suggests that the debate has been settled. But it is unlikely that the defense of photography as art will ever completely subside. As long as photography is not only a voracious way of seeing but one which needs to claim that it is a special, distinctive way, photographers will continue to take shelter (if only covertly) in the defiled but still prestigious precincts of art.
Photographers who suppose they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified in painting by taking pictures remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from art, or Art, by the act of painting (that is, by treating the canvas as a field of action rather than as an object). And much of the prestige that photography has recently acquired as an art is based on the convergence of its claims with those of more recent painting and sculpture.
[2]
The seemingly insatiable appetite for photography in the 1970s expresses more than the pleasure of discovering and exploring a relatively neglected art form; it derives much of its fervor from the desire to reaffirm the dismissal of abstract art which was one of the messages of the pop taste of the 1960s. Paying more and more attention to photographs is a great relief to sensibilities tired of, or eager to avoid, the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical modernist painting presupposes highly developed skills of looking, and a familiarity with other art and with certain notions about the history of art. Photography, like pop art, reassures viewers that art isn't hard; it seems to be more about subjects than about art.
Photography is the most successful vehicle of modernist taste in its pop version, with its zeal for debunking the high culture of the past (focusing on shards, junk, odd stuff; excluding nothing); its conscientious courting of vulgarity; its affection for kitsch; its skill in reconciling avant-garde ambitions with the rewards of commercialism; its pseudoradical patronizing of art as reactionary, elitist, snobbish, insincere, artificial, out of touch with the broad truths of everyday life; its transformation of art into cultural document. At the same time, photography has gradually acquired all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic modernist art. Many professionals are now worried that this populist strategy is being carried too far, and that the public will forget that photography is, after all, a noble and exalted activity—in short, an art. For the modernist promotion of naive art always contains a joker: that one continue to honor its hidden claim to sophistication.
It cannot be a coincidence that just about the time that photographers stopped discussing whether photography is an art, it was acclaimed as one by the general public and photography entered, in force, into the museum. The museum's naturalization of photography as art is the conclusive victory of the century-long
campaign waged by modernist taste on behalf of an open-ended definition of art, photography offering a much more suitable terrain than painting for this effort. For the line between amateur and professional, primitive and sophisticated is not just harder to draw with photography than it is with painting—it has little meaning. Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken by anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as representative of photography’s characteristic powers as a Stieglitz or an Evans.