I always find it interesting and a bit odd when I come across photography critics who are not also photographers themselves. Susan Sontag is in this category of photography critics and her approach to looking at the field and deciphering what is important is unique because she is coming from in between two worlds, one filled with photographers and another filled with the rest of the population who are not so artistically inclined. She does not consider herself an actually photographic critic because she is not particularly interested in practice of picture taking but the act of looking at and consuming images and how it impacts us.
Normally, the first thing I notice when I look at photographs is its aesthetic qualities. I love bold, colorful images that catch my eye and I love photographs that make me curious and make me want to think and learn more. I think this initial reaction is common for a lot of people looking at photographs. This type of reaction and contemplation about a photo is one than Sontag was uninterested in.
If I look at the photograph “Untitled” using Sontag’s approach, I am required to look at it from a completely different perspective. Sontag remarks that “the world becomes a series of events that you transform into pictures, and those events have reality, so far as you have the pictures of them.” This observation is an accurate one, I believe, because if I think back to my own personal experiences, the idea holds true. I’m sure everyone can attest to the fact that many events and gatherings they have attended in their life have been captured by a photograph. In our society, we rarely do anything of importance without taking a picture of it.
Instead of using photographs to commemorate important events, we now use photograph to deem events important; if a photograph is not taken at an event, it is as though the importance and the memory of that even is immediately lowered and forgotten.
So when I look at this photograph and see what appear to be a mother, her children and family pets, I automatically assume the photograph was taken to commemorate some sort of event. The fact that this photograph taken tells me that the purpose was to mark some sort of occasion, because “to appraise an event as valuable or interesting or beautiful is to wish to have a photograph taken of it.”
The existence of this photograph tells me everything I need to know about it. It represents something important because the act of choosing to photograph this event made it so. This is the “mindset” of our society now when it comes to viewing images. The way I just looked at this photograph is an example of our consummation of images. We see so many images and photographs now and they have become so ingrained in our culture that we have automatic associations when looking at them. We “know” why photographs are taken so we can glance at one, automatically “understand” it and go on to the next image.
I think what Sontag does is look at the field of photography as it exists within society. Once we as photographers find ourselves within the world of photography we get caught up in it and often forget that our work exists not on our own but within a society. The norms and mindset of our society has a great impact on our work and its meaning yet we often don’t remember that this affects how and why people look at our work. I’m glad Sontag wrote this because I think she bridges general society and photography together well and she reminded me something I tend to forget – we live in a consumerist world and photographs are consumed just like anything else.
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