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Posts Tagged ‘Sontag’

Too hasty in a comment re Annie Liebovitz

This is an update of sorts to this post in which I was critical of Annie Leibovitz’s ability to deal with the mundane matters of life i.e money.

This post along with the comments sheds a different light on things. This one and it’s comments likewise

They both point out the problems that Leibovitz faced when having to deal with Sontag’s Estate and especially several properties. The law treats same sex couples in a very different way than it does different sex couples with regards to this matter.

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Wiki article on Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ is really bad

The Wiki article in it’s entirety:

• In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the corrosive role of photography in affluent mass-media capitalist societies, and refutes the idea that photography is just a sort of note taking. Sontag uses Depression-era documentary photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration as an example of the “predatory” nature of photographers, and claims that the FSA employees – most of whom were established photographers – “would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film –the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry.” However, the intact FSA archives at the Library of Congress contain 160,000 negatives from which 77,000 finished original prints were made for the press – an FSA ‘shot to print’ ratio not of “dozens” but of just over 2:1.
• Acclaim and Awards
• On publication in 1977, the book received a huge amount of press publicity, and was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in the same year. The work was also seized on by U.S. academics in order to justify the study of photography, there being a general unawareness at that time of the work already done on photography by European thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes.^{[citation needed}
  
• Criticism
• Critics have noted that Sontag was not herself a photographer, and that the book is subjective, literary and polemical rather than being the result of a reasoned methodology. Nor does it arise from her sustained analysis of the work of any particular photographer or photographers, which is absent. Even before publication, Dru Shipman had published a point-by-point rebuttal of essays that would later be included in On Photography. Many of the reviews from the world of art photography that followed On Photography’s publication were skeptical and often hostile, such as those of Colin L. Westerbeck and Michael Lesey.
• Over the last 20 years, many of Sontag’s key arguments have been questioned or overturned, and several contradictions between the different essays in the book have been pointed out.
• Since 1982, no significant book anthologies of photography criticism have contained essays by Sontag. A literature search in 1998 by David Jacobs found that: “By the early ’90s, specific references to On Photography have all but disappeared from the critical and scholarly literature.”
• In 2004 Sontag herself published a partial refutation of the opinions she espoused in On Photography.

The above is the entire Wikipedia article on the collection of essays On Photography by Susan Sontag. I’ve lifted the article in its entirety because Wiki pieces are constantly evolving and my criticism will be of this version. As far as I know it is OK to copy articles as long as attribution is given. If anyone knows this not to be the case I will edit down accordingly.

I love Wikipedia, I use it all the time while being aware enough to realize that many forces are at play that can either wilfully or accidentally distort the writings. Usually though the distortions or inaccuracies are minor and the bias is limited.  This article has obviously slipped through the net. The author has a definite point of view that he is determined to push and one that would lead a reader to an entirely wrong view of not only Sontag but also of photographers. Judging by the defensive nature of the piece I suspect that the author is a photographer not yet experienced enough, or comfortable enough to be able to look at their hobby with a critical eye.

I am a semi professional photographer and I regard Sontag’s work on the subject as essential, in fact I would make her work compulsory reading for anyone who desires to take something beyond a holiday or drunken friend snapshot.

I do not agree with everything that Sontag writes by any means but that is not important, the internal discussion that her ideas promote is, however, essential.

Sontag sees  photography as being ‘friendly work’ that allows people with an extreme work ethic a legitimate way of winding down specifying Americans, Germans and the Japanese. (I think that she has a fair point here but spoils it a little by generalizing to whole nations). Another of her main thrusts is that the photographer is a type of modern day hunter. These are two essential points made in the essay collection but no one would know it from reading the hack job quoted in full, above.

In all fairness there is a note on the original page that the neutrality of the article is in question and under discussion, in my humble opinion that should be one extremely short discussion.