Russell Ku SocSc180i - A-Q1 Summary on Reading by Sontag

Susan Sontag’s In Plato’s Cave asserts on the significance of the human photograph. The author
stresses that to photograph “is to appropriate the thing photographed.” She explains that this
means putting oneself to a certain relation to the world that feels like power. She also notes that
photographs do not seem to be statements about the world rather they serve as pieces of reality
that anyone can make or acquire. Sontag notes that taking a photograph is essentially an event and an
act of non-intervention. She says that this due to the fact that the action itself suggests that such time
consists of interesting events and one encourages the event to complete itself regardless of its moral
character. She likened the photograph to a wood fire in a room that is both a pseudo-presence and a
token of absence as it provides “incitements to reverie” as one who sees it attempts to lay claim to
another reality. Sontag concludes that the industrialization of photography led to its rapid adaptation into
rational society as photographs have become part of the general furniture of the environment one lives in.

As photography is becoming more developed and industrialized, the form has become more widely
practiced as an amusement alike to mass art forms. Photography has become the following:
● A social rite - Association of the camera with family life through memorializing the achievements
of individuals considered as members of families.
● A defense against anxiety - Photographs provides people an imaginary possession of a past that
is unreal or take possession of space in which they are insecure (certifying experience).
Association of the photograph with tourism.
● A tool of power - Photographs provide an appearance of participation in an event.

In relation to photography being a tool of power, taking a photograph has a perverse and sexual nature.
Although there is distance and detachment between the photographer and subject, the camera can
trespass, distort, exploit, and even assassinate the subject in a metaphorical manner. The camera itself
also is sold alike to weapons that are automated and ready to spring as manufacturers reassure
customers that taking pictures is as simple as pressing the trigger. To photograph people in this turn
would be to violate them and turning people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Sontag emphasizes that the photograph is significant in many ways than one may have imagined
especially in analyzing the power dynamics between the photographer and the subject and the role of
industrialization towards the development of modern photography and its common uses. The role of
photography as a tool of power and the emphasis of non-intervention shows the detachment of the
photographer from the moral and political boundaries of the event one is taking. However, Sontag uses it
rather as a criticism of the freedoms and power that photographers have abused at the cost of those
whose photos were taken. This can be displayed through the modern form of the paparazzi wherein
celebrities’ sense of privacy of their social life is being violated by photographers for the sake of
commodification and sensationalism. This is rather demonstrated by the life of Princess Diana after her
divorce with Prince Charles or pop star Britney Spear’s implosion which was best demonstrated by a
photograph of her shaving her head. What Sontag’s article display is that although the modernization of
the photograph has helped people grasp a snippet of reality that they desire, it has also led to freedoms
that are abused by those who are in charge of memorializing these snippets of reality.

OPINION: Sontag’s In Plato’s Cave although shows the significance of the photograph of modern society
also criticizes the freedoms that surround this art form at the demise of a person’s reality at that moment
of time.
Apply labels to things because they possess certain essential qualities that make them what they are.
The conventionalist view is that how we regard things determines what they are.

Six contradictions
- Photography and experience
- Photos certify existence; give shape to experience; our very sense of situation is now
articulated by the camera’s interventions; something—an event, a landmark, a
moment—creates the “appearance of participation.
- Also means to refuse experience
- By “limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience
into an image, a souvenir.” (evident in tourism)
- Reduces: Democratizes all experiences by translating them to images
- “Photographs really are experience captured,” then, can be understood in two,
contradictory ways
- A human experience
- Reducing photographs to captured images is a reduction of human experience
- Photography and reality
- To collect photos is to collect the world → Is also a possession of reality itself
- Appropriates the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain
relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power
- To photograph people is to violate them, turning people into objects that can be
symbolically possessed
- Also a way of keeping the world at a distance (see the big picture)
- Omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of
interesting events, events worth photographing
- Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding
particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes
- Photography is a way of seeing the world: “Photography reinforces a nominalist view of
social reality as consisting of small units of an apparently infinite number.”
- Photography and agency
- Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention
- The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot
intervene
- Most of photography doesn’t just happen
- “In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another,
photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.”
- “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.” And again:
“picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory
rights—to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on.”
- Photography and art
- Like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art.” It is
meant to do everyday things: memorialize achievements, record family life, document
paperwork, and so on. “It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of
power
- Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the
level of art
- Partly because of human agency, partly because of serendipity, “photographs
are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.”
- Photography and information
- All photographs, all visual media, can be understood as information. As Sontag asserts,
“Photographs furnish evidence.”
 - The contradiction lies in the purpose for which the information is used.
- The camera record incriminates
- The camera record justifies
- “The information that photographs can give starts to seem very important at that
moment in cultural history when everyone is thought to have a right to something called
news.”
- Photography and power
- “Photographs shock as they show something novel.” But they can also, and very
quickly, dull our senses.
- “Images transfix. Images anesthetize.”