on photography

I've been thinking a bit about photography recently. Mostly because I've been reading an excellent book by Susan Sontag titled "On Photography". Susan Sontag is one of my favourite authors, she writes fiction, and non-fiction on a whole range of topics. I find her thoughts really insightful. Her book "On Photography" explores a number of different ideas about why we take photographs and what this signifies.

She ponders why it is that we find beauty in everyday items, the'everyday beautiful' as Nick and Jonno call it. The mundane, or the everyday has for many years been a major focus of photography: "bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look beautiful, through the camera's eye". Relating this to a surrealist asethetic she notes that "the Surrealist ragpicker's acuity was directed to finding beautiful what other people found ugly or without interest and relevance - bric-a-brac, naive or pop objects, urban debris". And she notes how in contrast to paintings which look worse over time, that photographs, "when they get scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still look good; do often look better". And she says that photography in this way is like architecture whose works are subject to the "same inexorable promotion through the passage of time" arguing that the Parthenon for example probably looks better as ruins. It is true that overtime, all photos become artistic, beautiful, unique - because of their reference to the past. Check out Found magazine to see our fascination of old photos and found scraps of things... my favourite from that site, is a note, that simply says, "Crossing the Delaware... snakes, wolves, space, the Century..." - cryptic, but equally fascinating!

Sontag also explores many other motivations for, and symbolism in photography. There is obviously the widely known concept of the photographer as voyeur - which is at its most strangest in photos of war victims - where the photographer has made a choice to photograph rather than assist the victim. Strange. She talks about boredom (an interesting concept for me) - she says that "boredom is just the reverse side of fascination" - both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. In fact, the Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination. Sontag notes that many photographers are outsiders who do not relate to the images they take (they are removed, distanced through the lens) - not intervening in their subjects' lives - just visiting.

One other obvious connotation with photographs - is death and the past. Photographs are a reminder of death and "an invitation to sentimentality. Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgements by the generalised pathos of looking at the past". I like this quote: "photography is the inventory of mortality". Commenting on observing photos of Polish Jews in WW2 - days, weeks, or months before they would die, Sontag says, "photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people".