Week One - Independent
Reading Response – Susan Sontag, ‘In Plato’s Cave’ from the book ‘On Photography
Para One – Overview of text, general opinion
“Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth” is the line which opens the chapter ‘In Plato’s Cave’ from Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography.’ In this chapter, Sontag compares photography and its use in the world to Plato’s Analogy of the cave. I think her main aim in this text is to deconstruct the perception of photos as reality or a realistic representation of reality. She does this by recontextualizing photography through the lens of art, society, experience and ethics. While also examining the place photography has in the world, the use of photography in everyday life, the act of taking a photo (and of having your photo taken) and the role of the photographer. Through exploring photography through such varied lenses, I think she is successful in her aim. I loved this text.
One interesting point Susan uses to explore this is the active role a photographer has in taking photographs, ‘Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience’. Though this is I think she is saying that no matter the intentions of a photographer, through the act of taking a photo, reality is tainted by the mere fact that they have chosen to take a photo, taken out the camera, lined up the shot and triggered the shutter. By doing so a photographer has decided that this moment alone is worth recording (With this exposure, under this light and with this framing). ‘’To photograph to appropriate the thing photographed’
Paragraph 2 – Photo as familial artifact
Talk about personal experience of family photos
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure
All photographs are ‘memento mori.’ To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt
The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance
