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

[airfrogusmc]

"1: why would any reasonable person have a problem with somebody engaging in an activity for their own enjoyment?"
Where in the book did you read that?

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

1: why would any reasonable person have a problem with somebody engaging in an activity for their own enjoyment?

2: Saying we now live in a society where ignorance rules the day seems to suggest that hasn't been the case before. Which is plainly wrong.

3: none of this has anything to do with using the camera as a socially acceptable gun substitute and taking pictures as a socially acceptable substitute for murder. Photography at large is not a hateful pursuit, I don't think anybody can reasonably argue it to be.

I don't think anyone here is arguing that photography is a hateful pursuit or a socially acceptable substitute for murder. Sontag was making the epistemologial argument that taking a photograph is a sublimated form of murder, of violence against a person. I think we've been saying she is potentially correct in certain circumstances, but it fails as epistemology to say that photography as an act is always an act of violence. There is no ONE photography - not all photographs are portraits, not all photographs of people are portraits, not all photographs have discreet photographer and subject. To argue that a photograph of a building or a self-portrait are an act of aggression and murder is to fail to understand the nature of violence.

 

[Sejanus.Aelianus]

1: why would any reasonable person have a problem with somebody engaging in an activity for their own enjoyment?

2: Saying we now live in a society where ignorance rules the day seems to suggest that hasn't been the case before. Which is plainly wrong.

3: none of this has anything to do with using the camera as a socially acceptable gun substitute and taking pictures as a socially acceptable substitute for murder. Photography at large is not a hateful pursuit, I don't think anybody can reasonably argue it to be.

I think that sums up the situation neatly.

 

[airfrogusmc]

I think that sums up the situation neatly.

It does?

I'm still waiting to be shown in her book where she had a problem with this?
"why would any reasonable person have a problem with somebody engaging in an activity for their own enjoyment?"

 

[mfunnell]

1: why would any reasonable person have a problem with somebody engaging in an activity for their own enjoyment?.

Reasonable? Possibly not. But huge numbers of people - entire political movements! - are based around preventing people from doing things they enjoy. Mostly, of course, this is claimed to be necessary in service of A Higher Cause (frequently "in order to protect children" - "anyone who disagrees with me wishes to harm children") but the real motivation often appears to be that dreadful lurking fear that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time.

...Mike

 

[airfrogusmc]

Reasonable? Possibly not. But huge numbers of people - entire political movements! - are based around preventing people from doing things they enjoy. Mostly, of course, this is claimed to be necessary in service of A Higher Cause (frequently "in order to protect children" - "anyone who disagrees with me wishes to harm children") but the real motivation often appears to be that dreadful lurking fear that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time.

...Mike

Still waiting for someone to show me where in her book she was implying that.

 

[Addy101]

One week later and you guys are still talking about this nonsense.... Wel, at least it stopped you from subliminal murdering people ;-)

 

[gho]

The camera equals gun analogy has been bugging me for quite some time. Opening the shutter and letting the light hit the film plane has quite a receptive quality.

A camera is not a gun-like object in itself for me, but it may well be fantasized into a weapon and used in a similar manner.

It is not so much the camera or photography but rather how it is used, that is in the user.

 

[mfunnell]

Still waiting for someone to show me where in her book she was implying that.

Where did I say she did 😕

 

[Ranchu]

From post #139
"When this kind of harm thing creeps into society as a whole it can become subconscious and sometimes photographers just reenforce negative things that can hurt without intent or conscious knowledge of the harm being done. The images of blacks in all kinds of things like movies, DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, is one that comes to mind. These negative stereo types were also in a lot of other images in photography and other mediums and were totally acceptable at the time and were very harmful though at the time many photographers and others were creating those images and some were just working on a subconscious level without any harm (murder) intended."
So you say this didn't happened?

I was hoping for some of that butt cheeks and pouting stuff you were talking about earlier. That's a much tougher claim of subliminal murder for you to make, imo. Guess not.

 

[tunalegs]

Still waiting for someone to show me where in her book she was implying that.

She wasn't. You were.

 

[tunalegs]

I don't think anyone here is arguing that photography is a hateful pursuit or a socially acceptable substitute for murder. Sontag was making the epistemologial argument that taking a photograph is a sublimated form of murder, of violence against a person.

Sublimation is a mechanism for acting out in socially acceptable ways on impulses which are socially unacceptable.

If one is saying photography is sublimated murder, then one is saying that photography is a socially acceptable alternative to murder.

While photography is generally socially acceptable - to say it is motivated by redirected murderous urges is a bit of a stretch. I honestly wonder if Freud himself would go so far.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

Sublimation is a mechanism for acting out in socially acceptable ways on impulses which are socially unacceptable.

If one is saying photography is sublimated murder, then one is saying that photography is a socially acceptable alternative to murder.

While photography is generally socially acceptable - to say it is motivated by redirected murderous urges is a bit of a stretch. I honestly wonder if Freud himself would go so far.

You're missing my point and cutting out the context of my statement when you quote me - I said Sontag's epistemology of photography as sublimated murder FAILS because it is posited as an absolute universal when in fact it is neither absolute nor universal. I'm agreeing with you that as a formulation of Photography, there can't be a single unifying theory of understanding, at least not as Sontag constructs it. Barthes (who has his own issues) at least makes sense when he talks about the punctum of an image- that THING about it that pierces us in an emotional way.

Photography, however, is at least as slippery as language - it is labile, unstable, and abstract. A photograph may be a thing, but it is a mere simulacrum, a stand-in for that thing. We recognize this quality about the photograph when we view it - we know it is NOT the thing photographed, any more than the word rock is an actual rock. What confuses us is the relative verisimilitude - a photograph of a rock gets us infinitely closer to identifying the exact rock described by the photograph than words ever will. But it is still NOT the rock. And it renders, with extreme fidelity, only selected attributes of that rock as defined by light, time and position. So in that sense it is as inaccurate a description of that rock as the word rock is.

 

[Ranchu]

But not a subliminal murder of the rock, imo. That would be going too far.

🙂

 

[Sejanus.Aelianus]

One week later and you guys are still talking about this nonsense.... Wel, at least it stopped you from subliminal murdering people ;-)

Annoyingly, you're absolutely right.

😀

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

But not a subliminal murder of the rock, imo. That would be going too far.

🙂

while it's hard to argue that murdering a rock is possible - you can't kill an inanimate object, and it is very hard for a rock to provoke the negative animus required for an act of murder, it can be argued that Sontag's metaphorical murder is still happening when you photograph that rock because you are removing it from time, space and context. To the extent that a rock has a life (it exists and persists), photographing that rock converts it from a four-dimensional object (something that has physical presence as well as temporal presence) to something two-dimensional (it has no volume, and it exists outside of time). In fact, the rock in your photograph no longer exists - it will never look exactly the same again as it did in your photograph. The leaves on the trees above will not be in the exact same configuration, the moss will have grown or died off, a deer will have peed on it, it will have eroded through the actions of wind and rain, it may crack from ice, or move when some kids come along and flip it over looking for fishing bait.

So to the extent that rendering something four-dimensional (height, depth, width, time) two dimensional (planar, out of time) is killing it (what is life after all but existence through time, interacting with the environment), then yes, it is possible to murder a stone by photographing it. But that fails to take into account intent, a prerequisite for murder, and it also fails to address the contradiction inherent in the act of photographing - to kill something is to simultaneously render it immortal.

 

[airfrogusmc]

while it's hard to argue that murdering a rock is possible - you can't kill an inanimate object, and it is very hard for a rock to provoke the negative animus required for an act of murder, it can be argued that Sontag's metaphorical murder is still happening when you photograph that rock because you are removing it from time, space and context. To the extent that a rock has a life (it exists and persists), photographing that rock converts it from a four-dimensional object (something that has physical presence as well as temporal presence) to something two-dimensional (it has no volume, and it exists outside of time). In fact, the rock in your photograph no longer exists - it will never look exactly the same again as it did in your photograph. The leaves on the trees above will not be in the exact same configuration, the moss will have grown or died off, a deer will have peed on it, it will have eroded through the actions of wind and rain, it may crack from ice, or move when some kids come along and flip it over looking for fishing bait.

So to the extent that rendering something four-dimensional (height, depth, width, time) two dimensional (planar, out of time) is killing it (what is life after all but existence through time, interacting with the environment), then yes, it is possible to murder a stone by photographing it. But that fails to take into account intent, a prerequisite for murder, and it also fails to address the contradiction inherent in the act of photographing - to kill something is to simultaneously render it immortal.

Very interesting and I think pretty much what she was getting at only articulated far better than i ever could.

A side note:
"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." - Richard Avedon

"Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be." - Duane Michals

"In photography we talk about illusions." - John Sexton

"All photographs lie, therefore all photographers are liars." - Monte H. Gerlach

"Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another."- John Szarkowski

Heres what Winogrand had to say.
About 2 min in but the entire piece is only 5 min or so and worth a watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl4f-QFCUek

Sorry for the slight side track but kinda related especially the way Winogrand address it.

 

[airfrogusmc]

Check this out.

http://vimeo.com/70639661#

Jill Freedman refers to it as "magnificent weapons"

 

[tunalegs]

while it's hard to argue that murdering a rock is possible - you can't kill an inanimate object, and it is very hard for a rock to provoke the negative animus required for an act of murder, it can be argued that Sontag's metaphorical murder is still happening when you photograph that rock because you are removing it from time, space and context.

Except of course that has absolutely nothing at all to do with what she was writing about in that particular passage.

Let me put the quote from the OP into some context so we can at least have a tiny smidgen of a clue of what Sontag is actually saying here.

Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon - one that's as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology. Manufacturers reassure their customers that taking pictures demands no skill or expert knowledge, that the machine is all-knowing, and responds to the slightest pressure of the will. It's as simple as turning the ignition key or pulling the trigger.

Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive. However, despite the extravagances of ordinary language and advertising, they are not lethal. In the hyperbole that markets cars like guns, there is at least this much truth: except in wartime, cars kill more people than guns do. The camera/gun does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff - like a man's fantasy of having a gun, knife, or tool between his legs. Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. One situation where people are switching from bullets to film is the photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari... Guns have metamorphosed into cameras...

It is completely 100% clear that Sontag is literally saying here that the camera is a socially acceptable substitute for a gun. That people are redirecting their violent urges to photography - or at the very least cameras are marketed to appeal to those urges.

 

[jsrockit]

I'm going skeet shooting with my camera this weekend!