Pics Or It Didn’t Happen

Is Photography Even a Healthy Pastime? Considering Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’

Our memory, our entire world, exists in photographs.

Weight-loss. New clothes. New phones. Travel. The right leather jacket. The haircut that makes me feel like ‘me’. Along with everyone else I know, I am trying in one way or another to achieve standards set by photographs.

Unleashed upon the world in 1839, the daguerreotype was the first photographic process that was scalable. It could be adopted, and used, by anyone. A daguerreotype portrait was certainly cheaper than any painted portrait.

A little more than a decade after the daguerreotype’s arrival philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken — formerly it was only the prominent; and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same — so that we shall only need one portrait.”

Then as now, the promise of access, the promise of control and the promise of self representation tease and tempt. Then as now, dare I say it, the promise of self-creation, too.

When I imagine my wedding, I imagine the photographs. When I imagine a good meal, I see the close-up photo of steam rising off a perfectly plated dish.

Photography As Performance

We’re all familiar with the refrain. “Pics or it didn’t happen!” Friends and family urge us to share images of that we see in their absence. We share ourselves photographically.

In her landmark book On Photography, Susan Sontag argues that our imaginations of — and preparations for how we appear in photography — shape our very being.

“So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of beautiful. House-proud hosts may pull out photographs of the place to show visitors how really splendid it is. We learn to see ourselves photographically; to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph” (Sontag, 85).

Sontag shapes her ruthless critique of the culture of photography around the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic. Briefly, the allegory of the cave describes a scenario in which people are shackled to the wall of a cave and see only shadows cast on the wall. The shadows come to constitute the prisoners’ reality, as it is all they ever experience. Only when one of the prisoners is free and exposed to the daylight, does he realise the truth. It is a dense allegory that Sontag exploits to express her view of the photograph as Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum; a simulation of reality only as powerful as we make it.

Sontag asserts that the photograph is the very core of our narcissistic and deranged modern world — that photography is an act of intervention, reinvention and make-believe.

“The mainstream of photographic activity has shown that a Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of the real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant. Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the once perceived by natural vision.” (Sontag, 42)

As a documentarian and photographer, I found Sontag’s meditation on photography jarring. In fact, for six months after reading On Photography, my camera gathered dust.

While I read, I placed notes on almost every page. Sontag’s every sentence stung. The book pulls back the curtain revealing inconvenient truths. My walk through Sontag’s concepts was like walking through a sweatshop, watching children stitch expensive Nike sneakers. Suddenly the colours are not so appealing. The design has new meaning.

Photographing “Truth”

I’d always been envious of the journalists who documented the Vietnam War. They were on the frontier, seeing and recording things for the first time. With a heavy idealism and bravery, these original correspondents exposed injustice; photojournalists brought confronting realities home and changed the world. While this may have been true fifty years ago, there is no frontier for any of us to explore now. With the proliferation of photography and travel, all we can do now is share our images online, with the purpose being enjoyment for either their escapist or morbid beauty.

Sontag quotes Walter Benjamin in 1934 as saying that the camera “is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can only say, ‘How beautiful.’ …It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself — by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way — into an object of enjoyment” (107).

We are attracted to technically perfect images. Famous photographs come to mind: Nick Ut’s capture of the napalm covered child running from an air assault in Vietnam; Kevin Carter’s photograph of a child being circled by vultures during the Ethiopian famine; and Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic. The element of information is surpassed by awe; these journalistic photos became high art, rich in meaning, symbolism and ultimately pleasure.

In Life, Or Observing It?

Donna Ferrato is a photojournalist who released a book on domestic violence, I am Unbeatable. She inevitably encountered situations where she had to make the choice to either photograph or intervene.

“I was there first as a photographer, not as a social worker,” reasoned Ferrato. “Yes, I would always be divided about whether to take a picture or defend the victim, but if I chose to put down my camera and stop one man from hitting one woman, I’d be helping just one woman. However, if I got the picture, I could help countless more.”

An approach reproached by Sontag.

“Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it” (82).

While the world falls apart around us, what help are these photographs really doing? As we scroll from that photo of domestic violence in the newspaper to a photo of a bikini-clad food blogger who eats only bananas, how are we using photography? Does the sin of idleness rest with the unengaged consumer or the photographer? Sontag writes of the suspicion the western world holds toward whatever seems literary and the growing reluctance of people to read even “subtitles in a foreign film”. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but Sontag disagrees.

Without the proper and thorough context, says Sontag, photographs can come to mean whatever we want them to mean.

“In the form of a photograph the explosion of an A-bomb can be used to advertise a safe” (175).

She argues that photography is a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world. When I travelled through Cambodia, I remember leaving my camera at the hotel while I visited the monument for the Killing Fields. I remember solemnly walking through the grounds, affected by the death that was so viscerally present in the air. When I entered the stupa that housed the bones exhumed from the mass graves for the purposes of memorializing the dead and the tragedy, I saw other tourists taking close up photos of the bones, or taking photos of each other in front of the monument. I can only imagine the accompanying hashtags to those posts.

Sontag writes that the future, which she writes about in 1977, may offer a dictatorship whose master idea is “the interesting” (178). Our capitalist society, for all its benefits, conditions us to treat our existence as a commodity; our currency is self-worth. We use photographs the same way glossy catalogues do — we are selling ourselves to the people around us, jostling for the highest social price. Sunsets, mountains, meals, coffees, club photos are all a statement of how desirable our experience is.

“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex” (178).

Whether we are boasting or seeking validation, we are certainly not in tune with the reality of our times.

What To Do

And so, I am left unsure of what to do with my camera. I understand now the impotence of attempting to express myself through curating and collecting images. The frontiers of the photography and broadsheet journalism of the 20th century have been replaced with the expansive and overpopulated jungle of the internet, smartphones and social media. Almost everyone in the developed world carries a camera on them at all times — there is now little left in the world that hasn’t been photographed. There is nothing new I can reveal with my camera that isn’t already available.

There’s a legitimate argument that says any photos I do take and share serve only narcissistic purposes: “look where I’ve been, what I’ve done, how far I’ve come.” At best.

At worst, a photograph might serve to trivialize, or even beautify, the morbidity of the world; the smiling children in the slums, the hardworking peasant in the fields and the broken skulls in the Killing Fields become objects of fascination and beauty instead of an insight into a problematic world.

Sontag finishes her collection of essays by going back into Plato’s cave, remarking that we have become the prisoners; we believe photographs — the representation of reality — to no longer be the standard of real life, instead we consider the images themselves, unquestioningly, to be real life. And the reality will never be as good as it looks in the pictures.