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May 3, 2010
In his Picasso and Co book Bassai says that Picasso, on being shown some of Brassai's 1932-33 Paris underworld photographs, commented:
When you see what you express through photography, you realise all the things that can no longer be the objective of painting. Why should the artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera? It would be absurd, wouldn't it? Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs in the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?
So what role for photography? To document or express the real in a world overloaded with imagery in which we surf on simulacra, as was suggested by the modernists?
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Queenstown caravan park, Tasmania, 2010
However, the inbuilt deceits of photography, and its anecdotal, non-synthesising nature conflicts with its implicit claim to truth. Horror exists, it stares us in the face, and we should respond appropriately with harrowing images. So argued Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, which was her follow-up to On Photography.
Well Mathew Brady visited the fields of carnage of the American Civil War when the battle was over. Presumably this represent the power of art to negate, which Sontag, the modernist, defends.
Sontag acknowledges that photography offers mere fragments of reality, since to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. Photographs are discrete, "neat" slices of time that starts from an intuitive response, and not analysis or intellectual considerations. Photography and works or art are not a text or commentary on the word, they are a thing in the world. In rejecting interpretation and meaning she advocates transparency, or experiencing things being what they are.
I would argue that Brady's photos are an interpretation of the American civil war not the luminousness of the thing in itself that is experienced. We "read" these photos in the context of American history not as a modernist thing in itself.
In this interview in 1975 in the Boston Review Sontag goes further when says:
I suppose the main tradition in photography is the one that implies that anything can be interesting if you take a photograph of it. It consists in discovering beauty, a beauty that can exist anywhere but is assumed to reside particularly in the random and the banal. Photography conflates the notions of the "beautiful" and the "interesting." It's a way of aestheticizing the whole world.
She adds that the Chinese take pictures of each other and of famous sites and monuments, as we do. But they're baffled by the foreigner who will rush to take a picture of an old, battered, peeling farmhouse door. They don't have our idea of the "picturesque." They don't understand photography as a method of appropriating and transforming reality—in pieces—which denies the very existence of inappropriate or unworthy subject matter.
Isn't the taking of a picture of an old, battered, peeling farmhouse door an expression of seeing art in daily life, as distinct from the photojourrnalist tradition?
Sontag adds that many people experience their lives as if they had cameras. But while they can see it, they can't say it. When they report an interesting event, their accounts frequently peter out in the statement, "I wish I had had my camera." There is a general breakdown in narrative skills, and few people tell stories well anymore. If narration is linear, then photography is anti-linear.
Sontag was anti-photography in the 1970s. Yet her charges of "mental pollution" and us being "image -junkies" would apply much more so to the moving image of television surely.
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