The Ethics of Seeing in Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” (Part 2)

Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image.

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Transcript

0:12 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography. We're covering In Plato's Cave and America Seen Through Photographs Darkly, which I've been bringing in a little bit primarily, but we've just been talking about In Plato's Cave. And I want to continue talking about the implied ethics, I want to call it, of Sontag's critique of photography by speaking of the ways in which photographs inure us. I think Sontag is very subtly setting up a shadow of that in which she's implying that there might be a different relationship to photography which we could somehow inculcate in ourselves.

I wonder if we can use this essay, in other words, to spin out some theories about what Sontag would say is a more ethical relationship to the photographic image. I think there's a suggestion in a couple of places what that might be. Well, she has this idea, as we've already covered, that there is something aggressive and therefore imperialistic about photography, and also that it flattens and democratizes the world at the same time. And therefore, in a strange sort of way, I think her middle Ground, or what she might be very subtly advocating for, is a kind of aristocracy