On Photography

From the perspective of someone who is an enthusiastic photographer, this book helped me to work through why I like to take pictures. Sontag discusses many of the purposes that photography has been identified with and used for, as a replacement for painting, for cataloguing the world around us, for attempting to replicate or copy the thing photographed.
She died before the real digital age of photography so many of her thoughts are only hints at the slightly strange reality that has unfolded, where billions of people now have an excellent camera in their pockets and can share their experiences and pictures instantly with each other. What would she have made of this I wonder? Photography is no longer attempting at being art for most show more people, it is simply
Sharing their lives with each other, frankly and unashamedly, even when often the things that are shared are not really worthy of attention.
Narcissism appears to be rife among younger people who pose and share images to each other and to the world as though to suggest that their value is related to their looks and not to their ideas. Sontag would have had a field day with Instagram, it’s a pity she isn’t here to see it. show less

Six meditations on the nature and implications of photography. Each essay pivots engagingly around a provocative theme: the “aesthetic consumerism” exemplified by taking and collecting photographs, the inherent surrealism of photographs, the incurable defensiveness of those who claim photography an art form, photography’s project of beautifying the world, the West as a “culture based on images.” My favorite is the second essay: “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” which traces the metamorphosis of Walt Whitman’s delirious vision of democratic vistas where beauty and ugliness are superseded, through the bland humanism of Edward Steichen and his “Family of Man” exhibit, to Diane Arbus’ clinical freakshow of show more “assorted monsters and borderline cases.” Being a longtime fan of historic photographs, I greatly enjoy Sontag’s thumbnail assessments of the cavalcade of photographic innovators. What I enjoy most, though, is the chance to savor what I call the “Sontag paragraph.” The SP is never too long or too short. It consists of sentences that are finely balanced carefully concentrated. The SP typically begins with a provocation like, “Photography inevitably entails a certain patronizing of reality,” and ends with something equally arresting, “Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” In between twist sinuously a series of asseverations, quotations, questions, asides, (rarely jokes), and speculations that trace the thought-motion of a woman who never stopped thinking. show less

There’s at least one photo project on every page of this classic work on photography and there’s good reason for that. Sontag writes eloquently and persuasively about the medium and its influence on our societies. Despite being written in the late 1970s, it’s also extremely accurate about the current state of the art with the rise in mobile phone camera use.

Some of her ideas she repudiated apparently in her later essay On Regarding the Pain of Others. But almost all her musings have become entrenched in how photography is now seen and critiqued. In short, judging from how others have written about On Photography, it seems it had more of an influence than even she could have realised.

The influence of this work is reflected below in show more the rating I awarded for Legacy. Very few books attain 100% in this category, but Sontag’s work deserves this.

No one is going to agree with all the opinions she puts forward here, but by writing in the style that she did, at the time that she did, and being the contraversial character that she was, she sparked untold myriad of discussions about the art and photography has never been the same since.

The book isn’t an easy read. Sontag was an intellectual giant and it can be hard to keep up with her references at times. Right off the bat, you need a familiarity with Plato, and Wikipedia will be your friend and companion throughout the journey.

It is, however, a very rewarding read. For those of us involved in photography, there’s an assignment on virtually every page. You could spend an entire photographic life exploring all the questions her writing demands we attempt to answer.

There are plenty of people out there who feel Sontag was wide of the mark with some of her observations, but there are also so many who feel she was spot on. Again, the importance of On Photography lies not in the definitive answers it gives us but the very important questions it asks. show less

I was fascinated by Sontag's insights and the way these essays appear unconstructed. While reading them, it struck me that they didn't appear to have been outlined or organized on paper, but rather seemed to be the comments of a brilliant person, almost just off the top of her head. Do all of these strokes of genius ring true? Are any of them provable? It doesn't seem to matter. I am reminded of Michael Keaton's character in the movie Night Shift when he tells Henry Winkler's character I'm an idea man, Chuck ...here's an example ... edible paper... Sontag was an idea person and I couldn't read more than a page or two of these essays without underlining something that startled me, either with its perspicacity or its novelty (yes, it's show more still novel 50 years later). show less

Hayat, bir an yakalanıp ebediyen sabitlenen önemli ayrıntılardan ibaret değildir. Ama fotoğraflar öyledir.

Fotoğraf toplum, politika ve tarih hakkında çok şey anlatır. Sontag ilk olarak 1973'te yayımlanan bu kitapta fotoğrafı ne yüceltir ne de küçümser. Tarihsel ve toplumsal bakış açısıyla onun avantajlarıyla dezavantajlarını karşılaştırırken, görüntü ile gerçeklik arasındaki ilişkiyi irdeler. Görüntülerin medyadaki kullanımının belirli siyasi, kültürel veya dinî amaçlara ve çıkarlara hizmet edip etmediğini sorgular, resim ile fotoğraf arasındaki ayrım üzerinde durur ve fotoğrafın bir sanat dalı olarak meşruiyetini tartışmaya açar.

Alanının kült kitaplarından biri kabul show more edilen ve yazarına dünya çapında büyük bir ün kazandıran Fotoğraf Üzerine’deki denemeler eski zamanlardan günümüze ünlü ve önemli fotoğrafçıların çalışmalarını ele alırken bir dizi estetik ve ahlaki soru da ortaya koyuyor.

“Bu konuda şimdiye dek yazılmış en mühim ve en özgün kitap… Müreffeh kitle iletişim toplumlarında fotoğrafın rolüne ilişkin gelecekteki tüm tartışmalar yahut analizler bundan böyle muhakkak onun kitabı üzerinden ilerleyecek.”
John Berger show less

The first essay was truly dazzling. The breadth and depth that Sontag plumbs in her analysis of our constantly changing relationship with photography, the cultural impact, the symbolism, the connections she makes between photography and various ideas are just remarkable, the precision of her words a quoter's delight. All this makes the first essay an absolute revelation.

Every essay afterwards gave diminishing returns for me. They were still good, but in a very strictly academic feel. They got so increasingly artistic and intellectual in its subjects, that they lost the appeal of the first essay (and indeed the general appeal of photography) in being accessible and revealing.

Aside: If it doesn't exist already, there should be a companion show more photography book/website that has the corresponding photographers+photographs in the order they were referenced in the book. show less

On Photography is a serious and intelligent book that is continually thought-provoking. That the thoughts it provokes may often be along the lines of “You’re full of shit, Sontag” hardly diminishes it; one measure of its quality is the mental resources Sontag forces you to muster to argue against it.

At its best, On Photography is brilliant: page after page, it presents brilliant ideas concerning how we look at photographs, what photographs mean to us, and how photography alters our world.

At its worst, however, On Photography is disingenuous intellectual sleight of hand, a game of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t in which Sontag continually shifts the goal posts to support her generalizations, and constructs houses of cards based on show more premises that she never fully examines.

http://ajsomerset.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/on-photography-reconsidered/ show less