The third entry in Rick's Sontag project is here. It is a photo of a mother at a land settlement meeting in the Spanish province of Estremadura in the 1930s, by the photojournalist and co-founder of Magnum Photos David Seymour (Chim). The mother has a baby on her breast, is apprehensive and is looking warily up to the sky.

The historical context is land reform in 1930s Spain. It was a pressing problem, especially in the south and southwest where absentees owned almost all the land. There, the landless farmers were virtually indentured. In Estremadura sixty thousand peasants had occupied fallow lands. Seymour was a concerned photographer whose work appeared in magazines, and so his images were a means to tell stories of people, places, and events. But his work has been culled from the culture industry, decontextualized from its orignal narrative and reframed by the art institution as exemplary photojournalism. Seymour's photograph then becomes an object worthy of aesthetic appreciation and a collectible object.

In responding to this image Sontag says:

"The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it." (p.39).

Rightly so. We have no idea of Seymour's intentions here. Nor can we empathize with them to gain historical understanding despite the emotional appeal of the closeness of the concerned photographer to the subject. What we have is a historical text without the benefit of the magazine spreads in which they appeared; a historical text that appeared in the mass media of the day as a documentary photo that bore witness to the events and experiences of of the day.

Though we have a cultural remains or trace of another period that is infused with meaning, we cannot get inside to see the world as either Chim or the mother did. Some----liberal humanists--- try and get round this problem by saying that we can bring people in the past who are so different to us by making them the same as us. Because they are the same as us--ie., we all have the same human nature--- we can gain historical understanding by empathizing with them in their situation.

This stripping people from their culture and stressing that people are, and always have been the same, becomes a ghostly centre in a postmodern world.

We can ask does this kind of documentary photo function as a form of critique in a society of the spectacle. Can it continue to give voice/expression to human suffering---the pain of others---in a culture of commodity aesthetics?

Sontag seems to think so. She says that our historical memory has:

"...conferred emblematic status on Chim's picture not for what it is described as showing (an outdoor political meeting, which took place four months before the war started) but for what was soon to happen in Spain that would have such enormous resonance: air attacks on cities and villages, for the sole purpose of destroying them completely, being used as a weapon of war for the first time in Europe."

With this Sontag undercuts the appeal of classic documentary photography in terms of its aura of truth which is the result of it being a representation of that's how it was. That old chestnut, that documentary photography offers an unmediated view of the world, is put to one side. With concerned photography we shift away from what the camera saw to the photographer who sees, not the camera; nor do cameras themselves make pictures. We accept that photographs do not offer a factual representation of the world, unbiased by the intervention of the photographer. The photographer interperts.

But Sontag is saying more than this. She is saying that what is important in the documentary picture is not that it represents what is real or true. What is important is the historical meaning of the cultural message---the air attacks on a civilian population. And this meaning resonates today with the US bombing of Baghdad.

However, there is more interpretive flux going on than Sontag makes out with her tacit appeal to the truth of documentary photography. The redescription of the past gives us an anti-war photo. But the texts of the past can continue to be redescribed----eg., the mother's relaxed comportment to breast feeding in a public space in Spain compared to a puritanical Australia in the 1930s. All these different interpretations both lean on each other and differentiate themselves from one another. This flux of interpretation destablizes the past, and in the cracks that are opened up, new histories can appear.