on photography sontag 1977

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  • Postado em 19 de dezembro, 2020


    To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the real. Feuerbach’s words—he is writing a few years after the invention of the camera—seem, more specifically, a presentiment of the impact of photography. The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. All future discussion or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." A “parody of the work of time” is what Nabokov calls this exemplary artifact; it is also a parody of the work of photography. For the images that have virtually unlimited authority in a modern society are mainly photographic images; and the scope of that authority stems from the properties peculiar to images taken by cameras. The interest to Antonioni of showing Chinese performing that elementary rite, having a trip documented by the camera, is evident: the photograph and being photographed are favorite contemporary subjects for the camera. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images. ... Susan Sontag. Not only are there proper subjects for the camera, those which are “positive,” inspirational (exemplary activities, smiling people, bright weather), and orderly, but there are proper ways of photographing, which derive from notions about the moral order of space that preclude the very idea of photographic seeing. The powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals. That photographic recording is always, potentially, a means of control was already recognized when such powers were in their infancy. It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of … On Photography, Susan Sontag’s exhaustive critique of photography, which excoriated photographers even as it elevated the art form, opens (in the 1977 book form of the collected essays) with the chapter “In Plato’s Cave.” The further back we go in history, as E.H. Gombrich has observed, the less sharp is the distinction between images and real things; in primitive societies, the thing and its image were simply two different, that is, physically distinct, manifestations of the same energy or spirit. On Photography by Susan Sontag Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” was first published as a series of essays in “The New York Review of Books” and then in book form in 1977. Two attitudes underlie this presumption that anything in the world is material for the camera. China’s far more repressive standards of order require not only monitoring behavior but changing hearts; there, surveillance is internalized to a degree without precedent, which suggests a more limited future for the camera as a means of surveillance in their society than in ours. New York: Anchor Books. Photographs give mock forms of possession: of the past, the present, even the future. Hill and Wang. Its machinery will inevitably be improved to provide still more detailed and, therefore, more useful maps of the real. In its simplest form, we have in a photograph surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing, a possession which gives photographs some of the character of unique objects. One can’t possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images—as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past. In China what is defined as an issue for debate is one about which there are “two lines,” a right one and a wrong one. While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, never does more than state an interpretation, a photograph never does less than register an emanation’ (light waves reflected by objects)—a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as “a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” Part of an accredited education programme MA Photography, Falmouth University. Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images; and philosophers since Plato have tried to loosen our dependence on images by evoking a standard of an image-free way of apprehending the real. The final reason for the need to photograph lies in the very logic of consumption itself. China offers the model of one kind of dictatorship, whose master idea is “the good,” in which the most unsparing limits are placed on all forms of expression, including images. The nature of a painting, Pierre observes, makes it. Falmouth MA Photography. One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as "a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." Hence, photography in our sense has no place in their society. To Hofrat Behrens, in The Magic Mountain, the pulmonary X-rays of his patients are diagnostic tools. The technology that has already minimized the extent to which the distance separating photographer from subject affects the precision and magnitude of the image; provided ways to photograph things which are unimaginably small as well as those, like stars, which are unimaginably far; rendered picture-taking independent of light itself (infra-red photography) and freed the picture-object from its confinement to two dimensions (holography); shrunk the interval between sighting the picture and holding it in one’s hands (from the first Kodak, when it took weeks before a developed roll of film was returned to the amateur photographer, to the Polaroid, which ejects the image in a few seconds); made images move (cinema) and achieved their simultaneous recording and transmission (video)—this technology has made photography an incomparable tool for deciphering behavior, predicting it, and interfering with it. But the true modern primitivism is not to regard the image as a real thing; photographic images are hardly that real. Partly, it is because one is “here,” not “there,” and partly it is the character of inevitability that all events acquire when they are transmuted into images. A personal response to the Khmer Rouge Genocide of 1975-1979, Unfinished Stories of Cambodia. But that is a characteristic contradiction which members of a society that splits public from private are expected to share in and live with. Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. To burn, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, of,. Photographic record is photography 's `` message, '' its on photography sontag 1977 humankind lingers unregenerately in 's. 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