Did Susan Sontag Use Predictive Analytics in the 1970s?
Having heard a lot about her writings, I recently bought a Kindle copy of Susan Sontag's essay collection 'About Photography'.
Reading through these essays is hard work and I have to admit that I need to re-read some of the paragraphs more than one time, trying to grasp what she actually is saying.
In her first essay, 'In Plato's Cave' [1], Sontag paints a quite critical picture of what photography is, or at least according to her had become in the 1970s. Which, on a side note, makes it remarkable to me that someone with her point of view on photography later ended up in a relationship with one of the most prolific portrait photographers of this era [2].
Although I disagree with a lot of her observations and conclusions about photography, I need to admit that some of these interestingly still are valid after 40 years. It even makes me wonder if Ms. Sontag was using some secret predictive analytics tool that helped her to make observations in the early 1970s which still hold truth for the current state of photography.
Let's have a look at some of her observations (quotes from the book in the gray boxes), and how they relate to today's photography.
“from its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects”
Remember, this is an observation made in the early 1970's when there was only film photography, which was limiting the number of images people took on a daily basis: 135 film usually has 24 or 36 images on a roll and, depending on the camera used, 120 and other medium format film could produce as less as 8 images per roll.
Today we not only have digital cameras with high capacity memory cards, but we also have phones that are capable of taking high-quality images. And we are using them: an indication of the number of images currently taken can be that more than 100 million photos and videos are taken and posted on a daily basis on Instagram only! [source: Omnicore]
And we not only capture enormous amounts of images, the same phones that enable us to capture on the go can also store all these images to be carried around and viewed at a later time. Or, in Sontag's words (and remember, written about 1970 when we only had prints to carry around):
“The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads - as an anthology of images.
with still photographs the image is also an object, light-weight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.”
Susan Sontag not only had 'prophetic' views about capturing and keeping images. She also had some remarkably modern observations about the impact of photography.
“a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images”
With today's capabilities to capture and share images, Sontag's observation seems to still make a lot of sense. Sharing images is now far easier than 40 years ago when the only means to show your images were in printed or slide format.
We snap images on the go and within seconds they are available for viewing globally. I can share my experience with the whole world, and the whole world can immediately enjoy and take part in my experience. From a 'sharing' perspective everyone's experiences have become more democratic indeed: nobody can complain that they don't know how it looks standing on the outer rim of a cliff, or on the middle of a railroad, or on the ledge of a bridge.
The question is valid, however, whether this actually is democratization of the experiences. The most viewed and shared, and re-shared, images are those from individuals called 'influencers'. They create, and sometimes actually make a living of sharing remarkable images that make people want to have the same experience. Most of us, however, can not take the same image or actually have the same experience. So is the experience actually democratized, or is it on the contrary made more elitair? In other words, are images being shared to provide an experience to the audience, or just to show off and make our audience 'following' us?
This immediately ties into another passage from Sontag's essay:
“Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.”
What we see most, what is published by the most renowned influencers, what we repeatedly see on a daily (hourly?) basis on Instagram and other social media is influencing what we should look at. It seems that we have created and are stuck in this endless sequence where images from people with the most followers are seen most, and as a consequence we are looking for images from people with a lot of followers, which leads to many more people following, which triggers people specifically looking at images from these 'influencers'. Are you still with me?
And, like Sontag, I think correctly, observed, it is not only influencing what is worth looking at, it also influences what we have a right to observe. It is the other side of the same coin: where influencers share their remarkable experiences, their audience is becoming entitled to be included in all these experiences. The image now becomes the experience.
This raises for me the question of whether we actually still care about what we create images of?
Yes, fortunately we still have photographers who create images with integrity: because they want to share a vision, or document in an honest manner what is happening in the world. Looking, however, at what we find on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etcetera, raises the question: do people take images because they care about something, or are most of the images only taken to show that we can take them; to be seen, irrespective of subject matte or quality; to get 'followers'?
As mentioned above, reading through Sontag's essay is hard work, and it sometimes seems that I am not the only one who has a hard time to find the direction her prose is leading us. Sometimes even the author herself seems to be lost and changing direction.
Compare for example this passage:
“what is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”
With this one:
“although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as painting and drawings are.”
I am fully aligned with Sontag on the second of these two statements.
Yes, photographs in principle capture what is reality during a sliver of time. But it is not the capturing that defines the final image, it is what the photographer does with the captured image in post-production.
Today the term 'post-production' immediately creates associations with Lightroom, Photoshop, ON1, Capture One, and similare image processing tools. But we should not forget that already in Sontag's lifetime, already since the beginning of photography, photo manipulation was possible and done. Even in a traditional darkroom, techniques like cropping, dodging, burning, and removing parts of an image were possible. Take as an example one of the most iconic images ever, Ansel Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez", which was printed and reprinted multiple times by its creator untill Adams finally achieved a print he thought came nearest to his original vision.
And this is only using the image as an interpretation of the world by adding, deleting, resizing, and other darkroom techniques. In addition, the photographer can use images as interpretations of the world around her by adding titles, narratives and stories, guiding the viewer to her interpretation of the scene.
Returning to Sontag's observations from the 1970s and how they relate to today's world where most images are being viewed and shared online, I want to end with what for me is one of the most remarkable passages from her essay 'In Plato's Cave':
“Photography becomes a rite of family life just when...the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery.”
”As...the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life.”
”A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family - and, often, is all that remains of it.”
For better or worse, our traditional family setup is even more dramatically changing than it was in Sontag's time. Traditional family patterns are changing and being replaced with new ones, some of which probably were unthinkable of 40 years ago.
And this triggers the question of whether this could be the real reason for the popularity of Facebook, Instagram, and other social media. Are we (and here I use 'we' in a very broad sense) looking for family connections that we no longer have in the real world? Are we in our fast-paced culture not connecting enough with our real family, and are we looking for substitutes? Are we replacing our traditional families and family albums with our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter families and albums?
Sontag triggers a lot of thoughts, and irrespective of whether I agree or not agree with Sontag's observations, reading this first essay in Sontag's 'In Plato's Cave' collection left me with very mixed feelings.
I can't agree with her world view and the over-critical approach to photography she displays in this essay, but I have to admire her for her capability to capture and pinpoint some core observations about photography that are still valid after all these years.
Notes:
1. Although the original story is by Plato, it was actually was a lesson from Socrates [back to paragraph]
2. Annie Leibovitz [back to paragraph]