“The Image World” or “Please, no moore pik-toors”

Yes, that’s my phonetic approximation of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s accent. Pretty bad, huh?

My decision to write about Susan Sontag’s essay The Image World was two fold. First, and least importantly, I was intellectually drawn to the piece by the ideas surrounding the act of taking pictures. Not many people really think about it, in fact, it’s become such a forsaken technological leap that it’s tacked onto just about everything as an “option”. I’m talking about cellphones, ipods, and anything that has the secondary function of being an image taker. My second reason why I wanted to write about Sontag’s essay was because for some strange reason the name has stuck with me all week. Sometime last week I was looking at the reading and I think my mind hooked the name Sontag and reel it into my unconscious. I’ve found myself thinking the word “Sontag” randomly and upon catching myself I wondered where I got the word from!

If you didn’t notice, I’m big on signs. I guess that makes me superstitious. Oh well.

Thumbing through the article after my first full read-through, it looks like I’ve highlighted at least a third of the work. There so much really interesting stuff here. Let’s do a “quote and reaction” post. I like those.

Quote: “Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all 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 stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”

Reaction: Sontag is obviously working with the understanding that with every painting the painter paints something of themselves into it. Unlike photographs where the lens is not biased, it “sees” what is there. The analogy to a footprint and death mask is odd, I really don’t know what to make of it.

Quote: “Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed because, unlike the earlier ones, it is not dependent on an image maker. However carefully the photographer intervenes in setting up and guiding the image-making process, the process itself remains an optical-chemical (or electronic) one…”

Reaction: This quote address some of the issues I have with photography being considered art. Here’s a story. My friends and I drove across Canada 3 years ago. In the van we had 2 painters, 1 self-styled poet, and 1 photographer. I can understand the art in painting, I can understand the art in writing poetry, but I find it difficult to reconcile how it is that photography is art. I can understand it as photographs are being taken in a setting where the photographer has full control over the lighting and all that jazz, but out in nature, what is it? It’s along the lines of “discovery” I suppose. People that discovery things, especially dealing with science, are really only finding and labelling what already exists. But still, the fact that they’ve “noticed” what others have not makes these findings important. It seems so strange that that’s the case.

Quote: “every body in its natural state was made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped infinitesimal films… Man never having been able to create, that is to make something material from an apparition, from something impalpable, or to make from nothing, an object—each Daguerreian operation was therefore going to lay hold of, detach, and use up one of the layers of the body on which it focused.”

Reaction: Balzac was one crazy son of a bitch. That’s truly my favourite part of this essay, the inclusion of Balzac’s belief of how a camera worked. It kinda plays along the lines of a theory I heard in a first year NATS course. The theory, from what I remember, had to do with a kitten in a box with atomic particles or something that give a random something something translating out to “ON” or “OFF” if it the atomic particles gave off the random “OFF” something something, that would tell a mechanism in the box to release poison gas, effectively killing the kitten. If it were the case that the atomic particles gave of the random “ON” something something, the kitten would stay alive. Since the box was closed and you didn’t know what had happened to the kitten, it was posited that the kitten was in a state of superposition. Meaning, it was dead, alive, and nothing at the same time. It was everything at once, until you looked at it. I think it was called Schrödinger’s Kitten. I’d look it up, but the internet is down.

Quote: “It is common now for people to insist about their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up—a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing—that “it seemed like a movie.” This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was.” AND “People in industrial countries seek to have their photographs taken—feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs.”

Reaction: I disagree with the whole “It seemed like a movie” being used as a way to further the realness of an experience. In fact, I am sure that most people when they say “It seemed like a movie” mean to add the idea that what they experienced was surreal, something that could ONLY happen in the movies. I’m not sure when this essay was written, and it might be the case that the ideas are dated, but really, I don’t see what she’s saying as true.
The second quote is also something I have to disagree with. Case in point: when I was younger and we had trick or treaters come to our house, my mom would always have the camera ready so she could take a picture of all the goblins and witches that came around. Now it’s not so kosher to do that, people are afraid of everyone else, they’re afraid that maybe some how the pictures will be used in some sick way on the internet. People are very conscious of where and how their images are used, and it’s not just celebrities. I once had a professor who I asked if I could tape her lecture. She said “Sure, just don’t put it on the internet.” It seems that the internet has changed a lot of the feelings towards having your picture taken. There’s something about the ease at which you copies can be produced that frightens a lot of people.

Quote: “Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing.”

Reaction: This is so true. It’s the whole “you seen one, you seen them all” idea. It is strange that though I’ve never seen the real Mona Lisa, I can actually go online and find a hi-res image wherein I can open in photoshop and actually see more detail than would be possible in real life. What does that mean about the original then? What is the relationship between the copy and the original? One is not surely better, they are almost the same, only one is old, the other timeless, multiplied, and not considered rare.
There are so many other things that I would love to react to in this essay, but I just can’t do it all. I guess in closing I should say something profound. Well, here goes:

Photography is something. What it is, I am not sure. It was, before this essay, just something I did with my digital camera. Now, it’s something that I cannot name. I should always keep in mind that one thing can always look like another, and I guess that’s one thing that photography cannot point us to. It cannot tell us what it shows us, it has the eyes, but not the words.