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korrick 's review for:
On Photography
by Susan Sontag
2.5/5
[Compared to the Vietnam War, t]he Korean War was understood differently—as part of the just struggle of the Free World against the Soviet Union and China—and, given that characterization, photographs of the cruelty of unlimited American firepower would have been irrelevant.If I reviewed this whilst in the state of mind I had when I first became aware of it, I would probably discuss how camera + photos were nothing more than tools of humiliation growing up, how my obsession with taking photos with one of those pretty looking cheapo cameras sold to newly released amateurs like myself during college was likely an attempt to 'reclaim' photography for myself, how I currently have no pictures up in my living space other than one taken during a seeming reunion at a queer festival with a couple of pre-college friends who quickly revealed that they wanted nothing to do me, that last all in a way symbolizing how much of my younger self I've had to cut away in order to live today. None of that, however, matters. What matters is that Sontag, like many thinker types, is at her best when she minds her own business, and that while this work has in some ways become extraordinarily irrelevant due to how technology has progressed, it would have retained a great deal more of its original value if the author hadn't been so careless in certain key parts. My fault, perhaps, in expecting a general level of skill from an author in all of their writings, rather than recognizing that my own bias that led me first to [b:Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors|52375|Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors|Susan Sontag|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1429583860l/52375._SY75_.jpg|210637] years ago was not likely going to support me in the realm of a subject that I am largely inured to, or, at best, value in a clinically practical matter. So, while there are phrasings and concepts in this that I see myself making use of in the long term, I don't see myself reading any further of the author. Plainly put, not enough bang for my buck, too much tripe in ratio to the treasure, and when a work can't reach 200 pages without whole slots of Tumblr-style quotes stuffed in its rump, that's saying something.
Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them.
Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.At this work's best, it feeds into a commentary on the modern state of the US, wherein the government has allowed one corporation to continually increase its control over all image production and another corporation to almost entirely take over the selling of all the forms said images take. Someone more satisfied with the status quo would probably imagine I'm discussing Instagram or Pinterest or making yet another jab at Millennial-and-younger-coded paradigms, but I'm talking Disney on one hand and Amazon on the other. Tie in the surveillance state at in the Euro/Neo-Euro landscape, the military industrial complex abroad, and disaster capitalism and its venture philanthropists every in-between, and you really do have a scenario wherein whoever controls the image controls the world. It's why pretty much every mainstream media network is calling that group of fascists that cops let into the US White House a week ago a bunch of anarchists/antifa: the greatest threat to a government that has sanctioned the existence and later attempts of rehabilitation of a group whose claim to fame is mass antiblack lynchings are not groups looking to do more of the same. Sontag's limited by her refusal to take financial stability inordinately blessing certain demographics with prestige throughout the 19th & 20th c. in Euro/Neo-Euro times into account in her art/not art deliberations, but I was still able to see how the anxiety of photography so resembles the anxiety of literature in any country where separation of church and state and subsequent sacrifice of the state to capitalism necessitates that such entities that are largely capitalistically useless, i.e. the Arts, must necessarily substitute in place for the church/moral backbone. Thus the reason, in my corner of the world, library careers founding themselves on diversity/equity/inclusion and reading for "empathy" and "anti-racist" reading lists, as if someone's expanded subscription to Barnes & Noble is going to save Black Lives Matter activists from mysteriously killing themselves in the backs of police vehicles. The fact that a lot has changed is also indicated by how teaching viewers how to detected photoshopped/fake images is part of my job description, but when it comes to viewing a picture, it's a lot more like leading a horse to water across the board: libraries aren't going to completely combat the influence of pictorial propaganda plastered on every inch of every sector of US society. Indeed, that'd probably entail less funding in the long run.
Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.
The particular New York slum, Mulberry Bend, that Riis photographed in the late 1880s was subsequently torn down and its inhabitants rehoused by order of Theodore Roosevelt, then state governor, while other, equally dreadful slums were left standing.At its worst, the fact that this edition takes the form of a dry and cut collection of pages is quite misleading. It would best be served as one of those obnoxiously large coffee table books, where not a name or piece or museum display is mentioned without the opposite cross section being entirely devoted to relevant images that, despite Sontag's argument that photography inherently promotes equity, are still the ones she chooses to pass around so her dutiful little fans can buy the appropriate material from the appropriate sources and have the appropriate conversations with one another. For this is but one instance of Sontag, at certain key points, doing what I've grown to value most, for my own purposes at any rate, in writings like this: contradicting herself. Now, repetition is all well and good, for it demonstrates that writers are taking a certain care with their personal holisms rather than spewing out whatever's going to make for a good trumped up blog post for the highfalutin crowd and whatever their obsession is at the time. Contradiction, however, often occurs at the juncture between thought and loyalty, and when it comes to Sontag and many others, this is often an indication of conflict between their analysis of the general and their faith in the specific. Take Sontag's repeated juxtaposition of thousands of years of "Western" thought with a couple of day's/week's/month's observations of "Eastern" behavior, more truthfully rendered as the paradigm of the US/England/France/etc vs some news clippings of China/Japan. A reflection of each country's respective behavior (unruly resistance in the Opium Wars vs cultivated submission post WWII), perhaps? Or consider the fact that Alf Khumalo, unlike every other figure quoted in the back of this work, has to be characterized with "black," "outbreak of riots," "South Africa," alerting to readers whom they are expected to instinctively recognize and who won't be important enough in the long run to merit such. I'm not even going to touch upon the whole "martyr to the cause of the freaks/the modern necessity to compromise inherent sense of beauty with externalized compassion" theme Sontag had going on in the second piece of this collection, cause I'm sure someone's going to come out of the woodwork and spout on and on about how you have to read everything else the author's written to really get at why she's so committed to drawing the same old mewling and puking lines in the sand of who observes and who is observed. The rich do it and it's art, the poor do it and it's documentary and all that jazz. So, in essence, Sontag presents some effective tools with regards to unpacking photography that can be extended to creative media at large, and then does the opposite in a really predictable manner. "Dated," perhaps, but in ways that, considering both my previous experiences with Sontag and her general reputation, I was more than justified in expecting otherwise.
The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
[V]irtually every important photographer right up to the present has written manifestoes and credos expounding photography's moral and aesthetic mission.Part of the trend of 'read what you want' that I find so tedious these days is it tends to result in grotesque amounts of artificial positive reinforcement when it comes to the sorts of materials that is publicly deemed as "acceptable" to hold in high esteem. Thus, I imagine, why there's this collective blanking out in the more popular reviews regarding the issues I had with this work. There's also the whole 'identity politics' thing that I refuse to gloss over in order to raise the actually successful parts even higher as so many do, but honestly, if there had even been the slightest mention that any of what I encountered was rather off, I wouldn't feel the need to go on about it for so long. Sontag does some interesting stuff, but parts of it come off as more lazy/babbling nonsense/philosophy-lite than anything else because her writing's relative ease of comprehension makes it easy to see where she takes certain exceptions in her own proclaimed generalities just cause she can. It's a shame cause, once material like hers loses its artificial propping up in the form of the usual onanistic ivory towers feeding into onanistic mass public consumption (the fact that she uses 'narcissistic' in place of that perfectly serviceable descriptive is part of the issue), what of it is going to survive? Certain frames of thought of hers are going to remain serviceable so long as settler states are major actors on the field of image production, and I'd rather not have less positive bisexual Jewish woman rep in the world. There's just this whole component of uncritical 'awe' bundled with her and so many of the usual others that doesn't serve me well when I'm determining whether it's worth reading something. I could act in the manner that some seem to treat as a hard won right/badge of honor these days and cut off my reading once the entertainment factor runs out. However, considering what I just said about how such feeds into skewed representation on sites like these, am I going to make the problem even worse? Naaah. This book will survive a few knocks of this type. Otherwise, there's no point to it existing.
Photographers seem to need periodically to resist their own knowingness and to remystify what they do.
The feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt.