From On Photography by Susan Sontag:
"A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies."
I know this is ripped out of context, but would someone please explain to me what the hell she just said? This is kind of opaque to me.
It would help if you quoted enough to give context!
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Just the bare bones, and leaving aside nuances:
To photograph is to capture reality. To photograph is seemingly to document the world, and, as such, appears to have a certain authority. A necessary step towards our modern society was the invention of printing, but the price we pay for this abstraction of reality is to sacrifice the integrity and understanding gained from experiencing reality first hand through our natural senses. However, words are less treacherous than photography - which is the most common way of informing us about past and present events: words are not reality but an interpretation of the world, whereas photographs appear to capture reality itself.
[Sontag then continues by warning us that photographs, despite this veneer of truth, are themselves as subjective and abstracted from reality as text.]
Seems pretty straightforward and reasonable to me. All Sontag's pointing out is that, unlike the written word and paintings, photographs have a connection to reality and truth, but that because of this unique quality we should be wary of photographs: they might be of reality but are not reality, and they distort truth as easily as words do.
In fact, you can boil her entire book down to an exploration of this underlying theme: she is especially concerned with how our perception of reality is affected by the belief that photography is truthful.
(Do bear in mind that "On Photography" was published at the zenith of documentary photography, at a time when film images could and did change politics (e.g. Nick Ut's image of the girl burnt by napalm hastened the end of the Vietnam War). As an aside, Sontag also argued that photographs of violence would anaesthetise us: she was proved right - four decades after she published her book, we have become complacent about images of war, and it is inconceivable that a modern government would be affected by photographs like Ut's. Another example of the march of time is that part of her essay "Photographic Evangels" is now redundant: she discusses why photography fails to gain purchase as fine art with a status equal to paintings in museums. Today, of course, photography has achieved this status, with photographs such as Gursky's "Rheine II" in museums like Tate Modern and selling for millions of pounds. But the change from a current to a historical discussion of photography is not a failing: indeed, knowing how photography was seen in the past is just as relevant to understanding the medium as investigating how it is now seen and functions.)
I can't say I care for Sontag's writing style (better than Heidegger and Derrida - whose writing is especially opaque), and I disagree with her in places, but overall it's a useful book. You also have to bear in mind that it was written nearly 40 years ago - and things move on. In her final book, "Regarding the Pain Of Others", written a year before her death, she returns to photography and revises some of her earlier opinions.
"On Photography" came out in 1977, and by the end of the year was already in its fifth reprint. Since then, it has never been out of print, and has been published in untold editions. There is a reason for this endurance - but it is not an easy read, nor should what she writes be accepted unchallenged (I do not know anyone who accepts this book - nor Barthes' "Camera Lucida" - uncritically.)
As I said in my earlier post, some books are worth reading despite their literary style, not because of it.
