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.
Part of the problem is that there's more than just one "photography", and Ms. Sontag doesn't clarify which one she's talking about. There's photography as in day-to-day snapshots of daily record type where the primary if not only goal is to create an evidentiary record that "We were HERE. We did THIS. We EXISTED".
Then there's "fine art" photography where the image recorded is non-evidentiary in any sense beyond the fact that the objects recorded by the camera had a physical existence and passed in front of the camera's lens at some moment in time. The purpose of "fine art" photography is about representing the imagination and inner perception of the photographer as he or she imposed it upon the external world.
I'm leaving digital 'photography' out of the equation for the moment since within the overly broad realm of digital 'photography' it is possible to create parts of or entire images which have every appearance of being real but in fact are only simulacra of real objects and never had physical existence. Whether something photoshopped/Maya'ed is a photograph at all or in fact something altogether different is a separate argument.
In-between "fine art" and "record" photography there is a vast, indiscriminate middle which grasps alternatingly at either pole, or combines elements of both in varying degrees. The middle contains everything from porn to advertising to camera club photos to commercial portraiture. The categorization from one extreme to the other is a matter of intentionality - at the one pole, there is one intent only - to mechanically reproduce the scene that happens to be in front of the camera. The presence of the camera in this type of photograph is paramount - the image would not exist but for the camera - would that group of people be hugging each other around the barbecue grill if they were NOT posing for the camera to record the fact that they were at the barbecue, and they had a relationship?
At the other, the camera's presence is merely an incident of the creative process. The scene would exist even if only in the artist's mind, and the camera happens to be the tool by which it is brought into physical being. Were it not created by a camera, the artist would paint, sculpt, or draw their idea into being. Gregory Crewdson would probably paint his creations if he couldn't photograph them, because they represent an inner reality that is represented by physical objects but the relationship between those objects outside the frame of the photograph may be anywhere from coincidental to entirely imaginary.
Using Crewdson as an example again, he stages scenes for his camera using real people in real places, acting out scenes that convey emotions. Within these real places and scenes, there is virtually nothing he does not control (and when shooting in studio sets, there is truly NOTHING in the image that is not controlled by him). Yet the actors portraying the frustrated john ejecting his middle-aged prostitute from the taxi in the middle of the junkyard are just actors who may have just met that afternoon for the first time. The event portrayed never happened organically - the story it tells is inherently false. Neither the hooker nor the john nor the cab driver are actually a hooker, a john, or a cab driver. But for the photograph in front of us, we have no way to know that in fact a john EVER discharged from a taxi a middle-aged hooker (or any hooker for that matter) in the junkyard.
Neither the barbecue nor the Crewdson photograph constitute a murder in any sense of the term. The first one is proof of life, documentary evidence that maintains an existence beyond the grave. The other is a bringing to life of something that does not otherwise exist. This is not to say that photography CANNOT violate, injure or otherwise kill, but rather to refute violence as an inherent natural quality of a photograph.
