Just finished reading this book. I'd always read excerpts from it but never the whole thing.
It was interesting for me in that Sontag discussed to a lot of the photographers that I idolized when I began taking photographs as a teenager, such as Edward Weston and Bill Brandt. I remember I really enjoyed the physhical qualities of photography, printing, developing film, getting the exposure right, making images that were beautiful, and profound...but still spontaneous. Situating myself as some sort of heroic capturer of images. It's like there was this moment that I was chasing, in order to get some sort of romantic essence of a person. I guess emulating the masters of a medium is a way that artists often learn....
"Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed 'artists.' And contemporary vision, the new life, is based on honest approach to all problems, be they morals or art." -Edward Weston
Not many would consider the camera to be 'honest' any more. The camera idealizes, reduces, fetishizes, as Sontag says, "photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing- which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art- It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."
The photograph has the ability to make even very recent events nostalgic and of the past though. The present in a matter of hours becomes something perused on facebook as an event of the past. I looked through some of my work from when I was round 17.....
Very beautiful, very romantic. It's funny, while I don't record as profusely as back then, I think I still photograph a lot, so that I'll have something to look back on and remind me... There's still this desire to capture and idealize moments.
"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images."
-Susan Sontag, On Photography P. 178
It was interesting for me in that Sontag discussed to a lot of the photographers that I idolized when I began taking photographs as a teenager, such as Edward Weston and Bill Brandt. I remember I really enjoyed the physhical qualities of photography, printing, developing film, getting the exposure right, making images that were beautiful, and profound...but still spontaneous. Situating myself as some sort of heroic capturer of images. It's like there was this moment that I was chasing, in order to get some sort of romantic essence of a person. I guess emulating the masters of a medium is a way that artists often learn....
"Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed 'artists.' And contemporary vision, the new life, is based on honest approach to all problems, be they morals or art." -Edward Weston
Not many would consider the camera to be 'honest' any more. The camera idealizes, reduces, fetishizes, as Sontag says, "photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing- which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art- It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."
The photograph has the ability to make even very recent events nostalgic and of the past though. The present in a matter of hours becomes something perused on facebook as an event of the past. I looked through some of my work from when I was round 17.....
Very beautiful, very romantic. It's funny, while I don't record as profusely as back then, I think I still photograph a lot, so that I'll have something to look back on and remind me... There's still this desire to capture and idealize moments.
"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images."
-Susan Sontag, On Photography P. 178
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