NYT: Sontag Squared

[the Chinese people... 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.”
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Actually, the Chinese people would have been right to think so, and that is true for a majority of people around the world... The 'picturesque' is not defined by some pseudo-intellectual who felt the right to comment on photography simply because of a photographer lover, a majority of people have archetypal ideas of the picturesque that goes back to cave paintings.

This woman has an ability to annoy even beyond the grave...
 
I what way did you find it twaddle, Sparrow?

I thought it made some sense (at least what was written in the articles. I have not read 'on photography.')
 
Turtle said:
I what way did you find it twaddle, Sparrow?

I thought it made some sense (at least what was written in the articles. I have not read 'on photography.')
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I should have said verbose twaddle ... I read the book unfortunately and it too is peppered with delphic and pretentious phrases, gallery-speak of the highest order ...

"Which means that every photograph is equivalent even as each one is distinct"

"... that they all capture a precise present and register its conversion into an irretrievable past"

"Photographs seem at once durable and fragile, trivial and powerful, and contemplation of their place in the world leads naturally to musings on loss, mortality — even apocalypse"

... ya right, not that I got all the way through it ... it lacks plain English for a start
 
Interesting take on photo deluge

Interesting take on photo deluge

I read Scott's article yesterday. It struck me, after thinking about his hopefully accurate quotes of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, that the point being made is only the 'big picture'. In other words, when I look around and see the zillions of images swirling around in my view (everything from flickr to the annoying neighborhood billboard adverts), I can easily get depressed by this thought: What's the point of making another image? Its probably already been done, and what's the meaning of it anyway?? ... etc.

However, if I ignore all that, including my own depressing thoughts, and hold onto Gary Winogrand's thesis (which went something like: "I make photographs to see what something looks like photographed.") then I can happily continue pursuing this tantalizing craft with pleasure. This is what I'd call the 'small picture' view... the personal view of photography. I'll try to leave it to the philosophers to dwell on the 'big picture'.
 
Jamie Pillers said:
... when I look around and see the zillions of images swirling around in my view (everything from flickr to the annoying neighborhood billboard adverts), I can easily get depressed
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I think you're misdiagnosing your depressed state.

Images are not forced-watched to you like in The Clockwork Orange, you have the option to turn away and spend your time doing something else rather than browsing flicker.

Hyperboles are fine, but as long as they're not used as the basic premise of an argument.

Scott needs to stick to what he knows best, trashing Hollywood trash. Leave photography to those who actually do the dirty business of taking photos.
 
Good grief I thought it was just me that found her pompous and pretentious.
However I was told recently by a friend who is doing an MA on perception in art that the language used in her book was the norm for that type of academic discourse.
Maybe then, I wasn`t her audience but the book was still a waste of seven quid.
 
Jamie Pillers said:
.... I can easily get depressed by this thought: What's the point of making another image? Its probably already been done, and what's the meaning of it anyway?? ... etc.

However, if I ignore all that, including my own depressing thoughts, and hold onto Gary Winogrand's thesis (which went something like: "I make photographs to see what something looks like photographed.") then I can happily continue pursuing this tantalizing craft with pleasure. This is what I'd call the 'small picture' view... the personal view of photography......
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Over the weekend I paged back through the 'Post your Leica M portraits' running to well over 2000 posts, finding some wonderful photographs but also some wonderful people. The large number of these cherished and most often beautiful people and the still tiny proportion of the world they are were daunting extremes. Andreas Gursky can capture something of that idea in a single image.

I read 'On Photography' in the '80s and enjoyed Sontag's muscular obsession with an idea. Woody Allen wrote a short parody of her style, her love of the parenthesis, in the Times - "...whereas radio is an almost totally aural medium. (Switch off the radio and see how hard it is to hold your attention.)"

Scott's article brings up many of the ideas relevant to the philosophy of photography, particularly nostalgia. I usually am allergic to modern art but I have really taken to Andreas Gursky and his painfully nostalgic landscapes. I am currently reading the best thing since 'On Photography', Geoff Dyer's 'The Ongoing Moment', a seamless studio drop block of writing running through the old photograph, the perennial blind man, men in hats, men in coats and he explores the photograph and the photographer in a stimulating, erudite and thoroughly enjoyable way that almost feels as good as looking at photographs or taking them. Intellectual writing should be like that. I have a book on Mahler by Adorno. The effort to understand it nearly kills me, but it is such a pleasure. That pleasure was missing reading the OP's referenced article, but it's journalism.
 
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Philosophy of photography, I know its casually used in forums to create a section where people can talk about anything else other than gear -related to photography, but in true philosophical tradition there is no such a thing as a philosophy of photography... At best photography falls under aesthetics and ethics, and in the case of ethics more with the act and presentation of photography...

'Nostalgia' is related to psychology and not philosophy.
 
I find looking at photos so much more interesting that talking about them... some of my favorite photographers couldn't give a rats ass about all that babble, doesn't make them any less good :)
 
... In case people wanted to hurt their brain by abuse of language, there are much more sublime avanues, such as Sein und Zeit by Martin Heidegger or Sartre's pseudo-philosophical nonsense. Sontag is not even mildly interesting.


Imo the best 'intellectual' book on photography is The Americans, and the best part about that book is that you don't need to read some pretentious nonsense, all you have to do is look at the photos and its all 'there'.
 
I'm not sure what Sontag was getting at but photography is a whole lot of things and she was dealing with some of those things. My read is she should have chosen a clearly defined idea of photography to discuss. There's so much more to this boundless medium than she discusses.

She's certainly eloquent as a writer but hardly elegant in her style. It's too bad because her prolix style interferes with the delivery of her ideas. She's not the first to succumb to verbosity so I'll leave it at that.

The quote in the NYT is probably out of context and her comments on Chinese culture is horribly provincial and patronizing

Regarding A O Scott's piece, I'll just say my suspicion is it's mostly filler from internet searches and slapped together for some deadline. He should do better but we all take bad pictures too so I'll give him "a pass" on the basis he has to make a living and had to "hand something in"
 
If you want to understand Sontag on photography, read "The Painter of Modern Life" by Charles Baudelaire. Her entire aesthetic is found there.
 
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