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

[TheFlyingCamera]

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.

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.

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...

Using the larger Sontag quote as context, I still say she's wrong. She is assuming nefarious, predatory motive, and gendering the act of buying a camera as well as using it, that she ought to know better than to assume. Granted she wrote this before she became partners with Annie Liebovitz, but the very existence of women photographers and their use of the camera means either that all women photographers are suffering from penis envy (silly) or that cameras are in fact neutral tools and only take on a particular meaning in the hands of someone who intends to give it that meaning.

The point of the rock analogy was to show how her argument about subliminal murder is largely invalid, unless you accept the construct of murder not as an act of deliberate violence but rather an act of transfiguration. I don't know that I want to make that metaphysical leap.

I think this is a very interesting passage:

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.

In some ways she was absolutely prescient about today's instagram/pinterest/facebook/twitter world where phone-cams and security cams and cameras at the ATM are constantly recording us, with such banal frequency that we have to ignore and accept it in order to get on with our lives. That omnipresence of the photographic moment is the true murder by camera, because it is in fact something we are powerless to stop, object to, or control.

But getting back to murder by camera, I disagree that being seen by someone else as you have never seen yourself is not murder; it is a fact of life. EVERYONE who sees you, even without a camera in hand, sees you as you have never seen yourself.

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.

Again this assumes a constant, one-directional relationship between photographer and photographand in which the power of control is absolutely, uniquely and always in the hands of the photographer. It assumes the subject is never willing or complicit in the act of photographing, which we all know is not true.

What I'm saying is not that Sontag is absolutely wrong, but that she's not always wrong. Yes, photography of the trophy-hunting nature certainly occurs, and it occurs whether it is of the human, animal, vegetable or mineral. But to blanket ascribe that motive to all photographs, or even all photographs of animate objects, is flawed (see my earlier comments about self-portraits. Are those then ritualized suicides?).

 

[Jack Conrad]

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...

Perhaps Ms. Sontag was murdering society as a whole with her machine gun metaphors.

 

[Sejanus.Aelianus]

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

Good luck but remember that it's cheating if you use a wide angle.

 

[airfrogusmc]

Perhaps Ms. Sontag was murdering society as a whole with her machine gun metaphors.

I think we are all doing a fine job of that ourselves. She was just holding up a mirror.

There is some truth in what she says.
"Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive." Very true

"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." Cameras have gotten a lot more automated since she wrote this and their sales have really gone through the roof since the late 1970s. And the ease at which so many produce so little thats worth while has only multiplied. At times its hard to weed trough all the crap to get to anything worth while.

A little sump'm from Ansel Adams.
"I often wish we were limited to processes as difficult as the old wet plate and sun print methods. We would then be efficient, and would not have time or energy to make photographs of cauual quality or content."-Ansel Adams

Maybe Adams views might not have been that much different?
"...the common term taking a picture is more than just an idiom; it as a symbol of exploitation."-Ansel Adams

 

[Ranchu]

Like Jack says, seems to me Sontag just found a way of subliminally mass murdering all us lumpen by proxy. By making her claim that photography is murder she indulges herself in a fantasy of killing us and being rid of our tawdry lustings forever.

We're still here and she's gone, though.

:bang:

 

[Addy101]

Perhaps Ms. Sontag was murdering society as a whole with her machine gun metaphors.

I agree.

I think we are all doing a fine job of that ourselves. She was just holding up a mirror.

There is some truth in what she says.
"Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive." Very true

True, but lacks any insight whatsoever.

Maybe Adams views might not have been that much different?
"...the common term taking a picture is more than just an idiom; it as a symbol of exploitation."-Ansel Adams

Ansel Adems wrote this long before ms. Sontag, this is of 1944. Doesn't make it true, but it makes ms. Sontag not that original :bang:

 

[airfrogusmc]

Have you read the book? There have been many that have posted in this thread that have not read the book as can clearly be seen by the comments. She was repeating and greatly expanding on something that many of the greats agreed on like Adams and Weston to name but two.

I, like TheFlyingCamera, have much I disagree with her on but the statement "Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive." I find to be very insightful. How is it not insightful? The camera manufactures just as the manufacturers of cars and guns all know this and use it as a powerful marketing tool. Those manufacturers get you addicted and create new products constantly to supply the need, which by the way they create. Its the desire to have the latest and greatest. If you don't you are somehow inadequate. Just take a look around all the camera forums. Very little talk about content but a lot of discussion about what camera took the image, the lens that was used and a lot of talk about the mechanics or in other words, the process. There's a lot of addicts (LoL) and the same can be said for cars and weapons.

 

[Ranchu]

It's not insightful because it's meaningless, clever huh?

It's not insightful because it's meaningless, clever huh?

the statement "Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive." I find to be very insightful. How is it not insightful?

"Like stoves and cookware, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive."

"Like crayolas and paper, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive."

"Like dvd players and valve amplifiers, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive."

I could go on indefinitely.

 

[noisycheese]

Check this out.

http://vimeo.com/70639661#

Jill Freedman refers to it as "magnificent weapons"

Hmm.

Next thing, politicians will want to impose a five day waiting period before you can pick up your "magnificent weapon" from the camera store when you buy it...