On Photography

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This is the worst book I've read about photography. It isn't even about photography, it is about Susan Sontag consistently misunderstanding photographs. It isn't intellectual, either. It is her emotional responses to the shallowest possible reading of photographs. The defining moment is in the appendix of quotations, the only good part of the book. The first quote is from the notebooks of William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the earliest photographers. He wrote, "Make picture of kaleidoscope." This idea of photography as painting with light is utterly outside the simplistic readings of photography in Sontag's book.

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Many of us take a countless number of photos, and with Facebook and other websites, we also now view many more photos than in the past. Susan Sontag thoughtfully explores the meaning of photos and photography in a series of essays published over years in "The New York Review of Books" in the 1970s. The book opens with "Plato's Cave," one of my favorite topics and certainly relevant to photography. She posits: "Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth." (p.3) Interesting, as she writes in these early years about the growing popularity of photography, she anticipates an "image-choked world." (p.15) This series of essays explores the value of photos in showing us places we will never see in person (creating a "substitute world" -p.162), its role in desensitizing viewers to horrors, and its essence of being an image of reality - not reality (Plato's cave). Sontag analyzes cultural and historical views of the nature of photography, and explores how certain filmmakers captured the art of image-making. This is a fascinating collection. Her thoughts resonate even more loudly today.