subjects are always revealing themselves

"Although photography generates works that can be called art—it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure—photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made."

Susan Sontag, On Photography 

I started shooting film photography in the summer of 2015 when I got bored with words.

Film felt like the perfect medium for the overexposed nostalgia I had in mind: I wanted to create things that could capture the soft brightness and dramatic shadows cast by figures beneath the California sunshine. I liked the grainy texture and how imperfect it looked in contrast to the sharp and perfectly staged photos people liked to post on Instagram then. Something about the look of film photos in the digital era seemed effortlessly beautiful and anachronistic, and I wanted something that would visually capture the ephemerality of the moments I wanted frozen in time. 

Susan Sontag argues that all photographs are memento mori: "precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt." This feels especially true of film photography with its inevitable time gap between when a photo was taken and when you can actually see how your photos developed. Shooting film has made me more aware of the disorientation between being present and preserving a moment.

While the act of taking a photo doesn't require prescience of the reality and surreality of the exact moment you press down on the shutter, it exists nonetheless. On Photography is an essay collection that explores how captured images have transformed our relationship between experience and reality. Even though the book was first published in 1977 and photo-taking technology has advanced considerably, her ideas still feel contemporary. 

One of the major themes explored throughout the collection is whether or not photography is art the way realist paintings are. It can be, if the photographer sets out to reveal beauty, Sontag concludes in "The Heroism of Vision": "The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adopted from nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism." 

But for most people, photography is a means to ends rather than an art form unto itself. In her first and most famous essay of the collection, "In Plato's Cave," Sontag explores our uneasy relationship with the power and anxiety photography gives us: "Like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, a tool of power." Photography becomes a tool for record-keeping, from wedding pictures and family portraits to mementos from travels abroad and important life moments. It's proof that you were a part of something, evidence that you were there, and what you saw would be remembered forever; "they are an attempt to contact or lay claim to another reality" that no longer exists as the moment you hit the shutter. 

Sontag related the increasing universality of cameras in the 1970s as a reflection of society's increased obsession with images as they replicate—and potentially replace—reality: "Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution." Her criticism has only grown more trenchant in the last half century; cameras and image sharing technology have seen rapid improvements over the years, from the development of automatic features and compact point-and-shoot film cameras of the 1980s and 1990s, to the advent and accessibility of digital cameras and sharing media on the internet by the 2000s, and the proliferation of smartphones and increasingly advanced camera technology of the 2010s through the present day. We are more image-obsessed than ever. 

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. 

In the final essay "The Image-World," Sontag explores the resultant power dynamics of ubiquitous images in an advanced industrial society, with observations of both China, where the camera is used as a tool for surveillance, and the Western capitalist world, where it is used as a means for spectacle. While the twin uses are by no means mutually exclusive, Sontag revealed our that human obsession with photographs have always fundamentally remained the same. 

There is an urge to say "it's not that deep" in response to Sontag's sweeping arguments. Maybe it isn't. Most people take and share photos for the sake of it and don't have any reason for why photography. But the way in which today's influencer culture has turned our image-dominant social media into a commercial space where personhood can be distilled into a product scares me. 

Reading Sontag is comforting somewhat: at least someone examined and forecasted the hunger for image consumption years before the founders of Instagram were even born. At least someone understood how it feels to want visual evidence to be perfectly preserved, illuminated by a split-second flash and fixed forever. At least someone recognized both the significance and the mundanity of photography and wrote about it more eloquently and thoughtfully than I ever could. 

xoxo, vivian

Pandemic portraits by Kyle on Kodak Portra 400. May 2020.