Is photographing someone a hostile act, a "subliminal murder?"

Is photographing someone a hostile act, a "subliminal murder?"

  • I agree with Sontag's outlook regarding photography. It is inherently hostile toward the subject

    Votes: 13 11.1%

  • I disagree - to call photography a "subliminal murder" is hogwash!

    Votes: 104 88.9%
  • Total voters
    117
  • Poll closed .
Jack Conrad said:
It's not the image that's to be blamed,
but the context in which it's framed.
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Never implied it was but the it is the visual result of a persons feelings and the way the choose to show the world. Which is exactly what that series of essays is getting at. And thats part I agree with.
 
tunalegs said:
The particular section of the book the quote comes from is trying to present the camera as a sort of surrogate weapon through which photographers can act out their aggressive fantasies. Her own particular example is that of people going on safaris to shoot photos of rare animals instead of shooting them dead with a gun.
Although it seems to make sense superficially, finding prey, shooting it, etc. - it doesn't really make all that much sense if one tries to look any deeper than the surface.

Honestly as a whole the book is not entirely bad, but a lot of it is oddly, maybe inappropriately anachronistic these days.

And I still don't see photography as an act of sublimated murder. The very concept of sublimation is primarily Freudian and I don't really buy that so much of our lives necessarily comes from suppressed subconscious sexual urges.
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It can be when it hurts people in a very deep way. Like the way it can reenforce negative views of say women. When you see the way a lot of advertising and other media portray woman it can be very evident. And it can be very harmful on many levels.
 
Sontag is lowbrow dribble

Sontag is lowbrow dribble

Nothing like Sartre. This is from Nihilism in Postmodernity, by Ashley Woodward.

"Sartre takes up Nietzsche's theme by positioning himself as a radical atheist and arguing that the bourgeoisie have not realized the full consequences of atheism: the loss of belief in God, followed through, necessarily leads to loss of belief in any objective structure that could provide a sense of meaning and value for human life. Sartre defines his philosophy of existentialism as 'nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. He is concerned with the problem of how an individual can live a meaningful, valuable life in the face of an objectively meaningless world, and how he or she can create values without the privilege of a secure foundation. While Sartre's treatment of nihilism develops many of the problems expressed by Nietzsche, his work is distinguished by an emphasis on human reality and the lived experience of the individual, an emphasis partly shaped by his employment of a phenomenological theory of meaning that centralizes consciousness in its account of the production of meaning in the world. Sartre thus contributes a distinctive, and highly influential, chapter to the saga of nihilism in the twentieth century by thinking through meaning and value in a way that places emphasis on the individual, consciousness, and lived experience, construing nihilism as a problem for human reality.

[...]

Sartre plays Out the Nietzschean theme of the death of God through the idea of contingency, arguing that the objective world and human existence are both radically contingent in the sense of lacking any necessary meaning or value. He argues that the world is meaningless in itself, and only appears meaningful through the human activity of conferring meaning on it. Without a God, there is no exterior guarantor of meaning, and the meaning and value of life are entirely dependent on human beings themselves.

Sartre further argues that there is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it. Moreover, human beings are unable to found themselves (they are not ens cosua sui). Because of this, human beings cannot be foundations for their own values-values cannot be determined on the basis of any pre-existing natural human essence, nor on the basis of a consistent and secure self-created essence. The meaning and value of human life thus have no secure foundation or justification, either in a transcendent source or in human nature."
 
... oddly I was going to say that Sontag had read Simone de Beauvoir and missed the point a bit, but yep Sartre will do
 
airfrogusmc said:
It can be when it hurts people in a very deep way. Like the way it can reenforce negative views of say women. When you see the way a lot of advertising and other media portray woman it can be very evident. And it can be very harmful on many levels.
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I remember reading somewhere that fashion designers were mostly men, because they were men who wanted to control women (by dictating fashion for them) to (subconsciously) get back at their overbearing mothers. I think this sort of falls into the same category of thought.

Sometimes the problem is that people are just stupid and callow, and therefore do stupid insensitive things without really thinking about the consequences (of what repeating stereotypes and cliches ad nauseum) will be.

Insensitivity? Or a rerouted urge for sexual violence? I think the former is more likely than the latter.
 
tunalegs said:
I remember reading somewhere that fashion designers were mostly men, because they were men who wanted to control women (by dictating fashion for them) to (subconsciously) get back at their overbearing mothers. I think this sort of falls into the same category of thought.

Sometimes the problem is that people are just stupid and callow, and therefore do stupid insensitive things without really thinking about the consequences (of what repeating stereotypes and cliches ad nauseum) will be.

Insensitivity? Or a rerouted urge for sexual violence? I think the former is more likely than the latter.
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But the damage done to your mothers and daughters is still the same. That's her point.
 
airfrogusmc said:
But the damage done to your mothers and daughters is still the same. That's her point.
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Then she's still wrong...and that's not anything to do with the particular passage quoted by the OP anyway.

She asserts a camera is a sublimated gun, based on how cameras are marketed. In the 1970s. "Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon..." Then using that rather dubious premise, concludes that if the camera is a sublimated gun, then photographing people is sublimated murder. That photographers have a subconscious desire to violate.

Since this is the case to her, she suggests that maybe people in the future will act out their aggression by "switching from bullets to film".

This is all fine I guess, if you happen to share her world outlook and care not for the experiences of others.
 
airfrogusmc said:
And I guess we will disagree because if you harm someone whether you intend to or not they are still harmed.
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But if in your close mindedness you dismiss other possibilities you might miss on other solutions.

Sontag's view here is very narrow. She wants photography to be about sex and violence - therefore it is. I'm sure she knew sex and violence always sells books.
 
Where did she say thats what she wants photography to be? She was making a prediction that is where it will wind up if it continues in the direction it was headed. And in many ways in that regard she was right. How many sites can you go to now and see a photo of a woman in a g string with her back to the camera and her but pushed out and her head turned back to the camera with her lips all puckered. You can't swing a dead cat and not hit one of those photos. And the photographer probably has no idea of how it really looks because we as a society have become so conditioned to woman being only sex objects that it is just natural that many photographers approach the subject in that manor. She wasn't saying its right only it was going to keep getting more and more prevalent and it has. And the fact that it hurts or mothers and daughters is a reality.

Thats not being close minded on my part. Thats just understanding the point she was making about once we as society see something shocking we keep needing a bigger shock to satisfy the itch and in many ways that has come true. Just turn on the TV and see all the crap. The news is always wanting a bigger crisis to cover to the point of pushing buttons to try and make it happen or even making it up if it's not there. Look at all the buzz words they use now to sensationalize a tragedy. They now all come up with things like "Horror in Cleveland" or 'Panic in Pittsburg" etc so a lot of what she discussed in the book has come true. So who's being close minded?

Again some things she discusses I agree with some I don't but some of the things she is discussing have become realities.

And the good thing is, and what part of her real intent was, we are at least discussing things that go beyond f/stops and shutter speeds which is always a good thing. These kinds of discussion about the impact of what we do on a larger scale should be discussed because there is really very little dialog about it as she also brought up in the book. Adams also talked a lot about the fact very little real conversations about content and impact of what photographs are and can have on society and that was in the 1940s. Not much has changed in that regard either.
 
airfrogusmc said:
Where did she say thats what she wants photography to be?
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She is constantly suggesting connections to sex throughout the book. I think it's obvious where her mind was.


airfrogusmc said:
Thats not being close minded on my part. Thats just understanding the point she was making about once we as society see something shocking we keep needing a bigger shock to satisfy the itch and in many ways that has come true.
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You are talking about a completely different point in the book, not what idea the OP was bringing up.

But let me present an alternative view on this tangent anyway. Sontag contends that we are shown images of awful things, until we become desensitized to them. Which says a lot about her place in the world and how she views the rest of it.

Come into the discussion with the understanding that good, evil, ordinary, extraordinary, etc. are all relative - arguably even arbitrary assessments.

Such images lose their shock value - because there is nothing inherently shocking about them. Such images are only shocking more or less because we're taught such things are shocking, and because we haven't seen them everyday.

We live in a society were people are so out of touch with the basic realities of their existence they are disgusted by the sight of the animals they eat getting slaughtered and butchered. Because we live in a society - where we basically believe that if we don't see it - it doesn't exist. We live in a society where we believe that not seeing it is normal. So to us, it's normal, right, and good, and taken for granted that those shocking things aren't normal.

Sontag makes the mistake I think, of assuming her normal is inherently normal. Even though she obviously knows better from other things she has written, her POV on this issue suggests that's the reasoning she has adopted on this matter. I'd say it's not so much a matter of becoming desensitized, so much as it is a matter of becoming dispirited from the knowledge that your normal is not universal, and that relatively, normal for a lot of other people is worse.

Of course that's not everybody. Some people see images of awful things, and it only inspires them to act. To suggest we're overloaded and all become apathetic and callous is if not a lie, a poor half truth.
 
Quite au contraire to Ms. Sontag's assertion, in many cases, a photograph serves to either keep someone alive who has passed, or bring someone to life who is in all other ways unknown to the viewer. Yes, a taken photograph in some ways does render an individual "dead" in that it is inherently a static representation of a single moment, a single expression, a single emotion, but to render something that is dynamic, static is not murder. If that were true then painting would be equally guilty of murder, unless she is somehow privilegeing the length of time it takes to paint a painting over the length of time it takes to photograph.
 
So I guess when someone is not doing well in a debate the first place they go is to try and turn it personal (I'm narrow minded because I think differently than you And because you don't find certain things shocking then what she is saying is certainly true that we as society have become numb to how our daughters should be seen by society, They are only good if their butts are in the air and there lips a puckered and they are presented in a sub-surveint way. Because that is pretty much 80% of what you see on the world wide web and it has become very acceptable. So she was right about that. And the numbing that goes on when we are bombarded with those images everyday and those images hurt the way those people are perceived on a real level and as she was getting at even more damaging on a subconscious level.

And think about the terms we use in photography. We shoot photographs. We take photographs. Those are just two examples. I'm sure we could all think of many more. George Carlin would have a blast with this stuff if he were still around.

But its clear we see it very differently and this is just going to go around and around. The good thing that came out of her book and I think the real reason she wrote it is the conversations that have come out of it. So whether we agree that she does make some valid points we can all agree it gets folks talking about something that is important and we should be discussing.

And if you don't think photography is diluted just take a real good look around. Camera club and calendar art rule the day. If I have to see on more landscape with a 30 sec exposure with water all ghosty rushing around rocks with a blown out sunset I think I will pull my eyes out (LoL). Can't anyone think of something just a little different?

Ah well.. Again, its running in circles now and starting to get personal so keep bashing something that got us all talking and she was right about at least a couple things.
 
I hope you realize that when I said "if in your... etc." I was being rhetorical and not referring to you specifically. I suppose I should have written "if in one's..."
 
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