Susan Sontag - Regarding the torture of Others.

An interesting article Susan sontag wrote for the New York Times about the Abu Gharib torture photographs.
Click here to see it.

Susan Sontag - On Photography

Quotes from Susan Sontag – On Photography

-Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still lingering in mere images of the truth.

-The inventory started in about 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in our cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at, and what we have the right to observe.

-They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the world in our heads: an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.

-To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and, therefore, like power.

-Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world, so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can acquire

-There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. From its start photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialisation of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning to democratise all experiences by translating them into images.

-Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relationship to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

-There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they can never see themselves, by having knowledge of them as they can never have: it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

-All photographs are momento mori: to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or things) mortality, Vulnerability, mutability, precisely by slicing out the moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

-Through photographs the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world that denies interconectiveness, continuity, but which confers each moment the character of a mystery.

-Industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies

-Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept that the camera records it. But this is the opposite to understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.

Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida

Ok, so I'l post a comprehensive reading list soon, but in the mean time I'l put up some nice quotes:

From Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida – Chapter 5

Very often (too often, for my taste) I have been photographed and knew about it. Now once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing”, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the photographer creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice .

No doubt it is metaphorically that I derive my existence from the photographer. But though this dependence is an imaginary one (and from the purest image-repertoire), I experience it with the anguish of uncertain filiation: an image – my image – will be generated: will I be born from an antipathetic individual or from a “good sort”? If only I could come out of the paper as on a classical canvas, endowed with a noble expression – thoughtful, intelligent, etc.!

What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among thousands of shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) “self”; but it is the contrary that must be said: “myself” never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn...If only photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing! Alas, I am doomed by (well-meaning) photography to always have an expression: my body never finds its zero degree, no one can give it to me.

In front of the lens, I am at the same time:

· The one I think I am

· The one I want others to think I am

· The one the photographer thinks I am

· The one he makes use of to exhibit his art.

In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares).