Representation in Self Portraiture This is a blog to keep track of my dissertation research and to help develop ideas in an organised manner.

Susan Sontag - On Photography
published by the penguin group
first published in this form 1977

On from omnipresence of photographed images.

Contents
In Plato's Cave 3
America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly 27
Melancholy Objects 51
The Heroism of Vision 85
Photographic Evangels 115
The Image World 153
A Brief Anthology of Quotations 183

----In Plato's Cave
humankind lingers in Plato's Cave (in denial, without truth) in mere images of the truth p3
This means, for example I have only ever seen pictures / video / depictions (representations) of the Pyramids, I have never actually SEEN them before. Same could be said for the planets... We could so easily be being decieved.
'inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems.'
"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images."p3
Develop the philosophical side for masters... 
"Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood." p3-4
"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed" p4
"What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings." p4 YES NEED.
"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." p4

"But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does" p5
"A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture ma distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture." p5
"While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency." p6 YES NEED FOR 3chpter
"Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tactit imperatives of taste and conscience." p6
"The immensely gifted memebers of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930a (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russel Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film..." p6 SUPPORTS multiple image selection, selection.
"... In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. These occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -and ubiquity- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression." p6-7 NEED interpretations

 
   




Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk