Platos Cave By Susan Sontag: 2 Paragraphs, 1000 Stories
Susan Sontag writes about how photography has become our all-encompassing way of recording life, but that other stories linger in the background. The beginning of the reading explains how we’ve been recording events throughout history. Whether through writing, painting, and eventually, photography. The writer explains how we interpret the world through works of art. Writing and drawings, as accurate as we wish them to and try to make them, they are an interpretation. They’re us creating paraphrased manuscripts so that we can vaguely remember the event through emotions. Whereas, while images also rely on emotions, they capture the memory in its rawest form. But that doesn’t make it immune to our artistry, or manipulation…
Susan Sontag goes on to explain how that though photographs are much closer to the direct truth than our translations through art, our photos are not as overt and can be just as misconstrued. She explains that we alter, we shift the perspective, we zoom in on unrelated pieces of an unrelated puzzle in an attempt to tell a different story, whether for our own artistic purposes or out of malicious intent. She states, “Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.” To capture a still moment in time is the truest form of experiencing a moment, second only to experiencing it first hand. There’s anxiety behind every snapped photo, that we should be working. That we should be happy. That we should be living. That there has to be meaning and if we don’t assign it meaning, it means nothing to anyone. We take photos to prove to the world we did what we did. Susan Sontag both praises and warns about this form of media. We once used photos mostly in books, vast arrangement on a page, decorated to entrance a reader. Now, we alter, we prepare, but rarely ever just let the photo be. We paint with pictures.
