“On Photography” (1977) by Susan Sontag
- Looking at photographs of people in the midst of conflict makes use voyeurs.
- When a photo shocks, it becomes more difficult for it to be pinned to its local context.
- When a photo shocks, it easily becomes a generic image.
Conflict photography is problematic
- Done well: moves people to think of art and pop culture (“it’s just like a movie”), instead of the suffering
- Done bad: it fails to catch our attention
Kinds of photographs that present crises without giving the feeling that they have all ben seen before
- Photos of survivors long after war
- Archival or found images to consider violence
- Photos that exclude humans: destroyed building, detritus-strewn battlefields, damaged landscapes
- Domestic objects whose meaning has been altered in the aftermath of a calamity (e.g., Kitchen scene in Donetsk, Ukraine, August 2014).
The absence of people in the photograph makes room for questions.
“Pears and Red Square,” Moscow, 1983
Photographs of people’s things reach us in this way even in the absence of such biographical coincidences because we recognize their things as being like ours.
Objects remind us of what was and no longer is. In this way, it can be more powerful than faces.
Stillness in photography can be more affecting than action.
- There is a respectful distance between the looker and the place of trouble and those whose trouble the objects signify.
- Objects are reservoirs of personal experiences.
We look at objects because they bring change to the core of the sympathetic self.
References
Cole, T. (2015, March 17). Object Lesson. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/magazine/object-lesson.html