|
Consumer
detritus and the elevation of "freaks":
A reconsideration of Susan Sontag's On Photography
•
To
say a photograph is worth 1,000 words is to repeat the hoariest
of clichés. Does that make the statement completely
wrong? Consider that the most unwavering of the Bush II administration's
censorship efforts is the suppression of photos. Americans
are not allowed to see coffins of dead soldiers nor even injured
soldiers, not the carnage wrought by their invading military
in Iraq, and most certainly not the horrific destruction of
Falluja. The corpses of the four mercenaries hung on the Falluja
bridge were shown; it was the easiest way to raise a sufficient
crescendo of indignation to create the political space needed
to carry out the vengeance-inspired massacre that the pitiless
logic of invasion required.
By
the same logic, the Bush II administration and the Pentagon
can't be completely upset by the Abu Ghraib torture photos.
Although word of mouth goes a long way when it comes to torture,
the handful of leaked photos did demonstrate to people in
developing nations around the world just what they can expect
should they get in the way of multinational corporations'
asset acquisition programs. Punishing the enlisted personnel
who carried out their orders rather effectively - and what,
after all, are enlistees for from the standpoint of the corporate
elite and their governmental and military hirelings? - provides
a nice public relations opportunity and also underscores that
the actual crime was the releasing of the photos and not the
torture itself. At any rate, the American corporate media
quickly tired of torture and abuse photos; intramedia competition
forced torture into the news temporarily, but there soon was
a tacit understanding that we had seen enough of these photos.
But
however ubiquitous photography is, it has its limits. Humans
see what they wish to see, which Susan Sontag amply demonstrated
in On Photography, although she demonstrated that principle
more than she intended. Sontag's book is a collection of six
essays written for The New York Review of Books during the
1970s, as the Vietnam War was winding down. The Pentagon certainly
has taken a lesson from that war, taking strong measures to
censor photography and videography today. But the military,
and the economic interests for which it serves, is more than
capable of using photography for its own purposes.
The photographs Mathew Brady
and his colleagues took of the horrors
of the battlefields did not make people any less keen to go
on with the Civil War. The photographs of ill-clad, skeletal
prisoners held at Andersonville
inflamed Northern opinion - against
the South. ... Photographs cannot create a moral position,
but they can reinforce one-and
can help build a nascent one.1
Sontag
also noted the propaganda value that a photo can have, although
a photo can be so iconographic that it transcends its political
use value.
The photograph that the Bolivian
authorities transmitted to the world
press in October 1967 of Che Guevara's body, laid out in a
stable on a stretcher on top
of a cement trough, surrounded by a Bolivian
colonel, a U.S. intelligence agent, and several journalists
and soldiers, not only summed
up the bitter realities of contemporary
Latin American history but had some inadvertent resemblances,
as John Berger has pointed out, to Mantagna's "The
Dead Christ" and Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson
of Professor Tulp." What
is compelling about the photograph partly derives
from what it shares, as a composition, with these paintings.
Indeed, the very extent to which that photograph is unforgettable
indicates its potential for being depoliticized, for becoming
a tireless image.2
Sontag's
argument here is that photography unnaturally beautifies what
it captures, even "the small Jewish boy photographed
in 1943 during a roundup in the Warsaw ghetto" with "arms
raised in terror."3 Sontag's lament (critique would be
too strong a word) is in contradiction to her themes elsewhere
in the essays when focused on cultural analyses. This contradiction
is most sharply in focus in her unwarranted criticisms of
Diane Arbus, which frankly say much more about Sontag herself
than Arbus. Sontag, with an air of disapproval, claimed that
Arbus' work
lined up assorted monsters
and borderline cases-most of them ugly;
wearing grotesque or unflattering clothing; in dismal or barren
surroundings. Arbus's work does not invite viewers to identify
with the pariahs and miserable-looking people she photographed.
Humanity is not "one."4
To
be sure, Arbus' work took a dark turn in her final works,
a collection grouped as "Untitled, 1970-71" in the
retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art that showed at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in
spring 2005. But Arbus' mental health must have been a factor
during this period; she committed suicide in 1971. Arbus'
skill, fully put to use prior to her final series, was to
bring out the humanity in her subjects and to coax out their
personality. Sontag's repeated reproaches to Arbus for showing
"victims" who are "pathetic," "pitiable"
and "repulsive," in which "everybody looks
the same," only paint Sontag as uncomfortable with ordinary
people even as her political sympathies were clearly with
them. "Anybody Arbus photographed was a freak,"5
citing, as one of several examples, a boy waiting to march
in a pro-war march wearing a "Bomb Hanoi" button.
But why is this earnest young man a "freak"? The
picture is of a naïve, fresh-scrubbed boy, rather typical
of the 1960s, and shows the young man as he is. His politics,
undoubtedly the product of teaching from a conservative family,
are horrible. We can recoil at the ignorance of wishing to
bomb people for the crime of resisting an invasion; we can
be amused at the absurdness of the sight (we can easily feel
both), but this falls far short of reaching the status of
"freak," especially as plenty of Americans, sadly,
supported the Vietnam War.
One
picture in the Arbus retrospective that particularly stands
out is "The 1938 Debutante of the Year at Home, Boston,
1966," a picture of an extremely privileged woman well
into the transition from middle age to seniority smoking in
her bed. Every pore of this woman exudes privilege, captured
in astonishing clarity by Arbus, a perhaps unequaled master
of technique. This woman, like most of those whom Arbus photographed,
was said to have loved the photo. Why not? It certainly captured
this woman brilliantly. This woman most assuredly would not
have considered herself a "freak." One photo that
Sontag did specifically mention in her catalogue of horror
is the "human pincushion" of New Jersey, a middle-aged
man who, while demonstrating his specialty, nonetheless is
very proud. The privileged once-debutante and the circus performer
are both far removed from the life experiences of most people,
but both, as are most of Arbus' subjects, clearly are comfortable
with themselves and thus in front of the camera. That they
are "freaks" because they are different, or simply
comfortable with their differences, is a terribly elitist
attitude, and a misreading of Arbus' work.
On
the larger terrain of consumerist culture and national privilege,
Sontag was on firmer ground, although her dismissal of Surrealism
is jarring.
Surrealism is the art of
generalizing the grotesque and then discovering
nuances (and charms) in that. No activity is better
equipped to exercise the Surrealist
way of looking than photography,
and eventually we look at all photographs surrealistically.
People are ransacking their attics and the archives
of the city and state historical societies for old photographs.
... The Surrealist strategy, which promised a new and
exciting vantage point for the radical criticism of modern
culture, has devolved into an
easy irony that democratizes all evidence,
that equates its scatter of evidence with history. Surrealism
can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of
history only an accumulation of oddities; a joke; a death
trip.6
Reactionary?
Pressing ahead with this ultraleft phrasemongering, Sontag
wrote:
Surrealists, who aspire to
be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries,
have often been under the well-intentioned illusion
that they could be, indeed should be, Marxists. But Surrealist
aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be compatible with
the twentieth century's most seductive form of moralism. ...
Photographers, operating within
the terms of the Surrealist sensibility,
suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world
and instead propose that we collect it.7
Sontag's
argument was part of her larger point that the ubiquity of
photography is a function of the privilege of capitalist nations
and that a culture based on consumerism necessarily produces
photographic detritus as it does other consumer products.
True enough. But consumer culture, none more so than the American
variety, is based on the reduction of freedom to the free
choosing of products and the active trampling or co-optation
of any artistic expression that does not extol consumerism,
while Surrealism arose as artistic expressions in opposition
to mechanized, mercantile society. This line of attack is
at least consistent with Sontag's attack on Arbus, but is
even more off the mark; the combination of squeamish cultural
conservatism and "more revolutionary than thou"
psuedoradicalism makes for a creaky Stalinist muddle. Sontag
had brilliant observations to make; it is difficult to understand
these sorts of sojourns that only detract from her larger
points.
Sontag
began to develop her central themes in the opening pages,
displaying the vast knowledge of photographic history that
she was known for. Sontag posited that taking vacation photos,
for many people, is a way of ameliorating feelings of guilt
for not working and that travel is reduced to becoming a strategy
for accumulating photographs.
The method especially appeals
to people handicapped by a ruthless
work ethic - Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera
appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not
working when they are on vacation and are supposed to be having
fun.8
Of
course, that was written before the rise of video recorders,
which frequently replace the camera. This sense has only escalated
with the notion that something did not happen if it wasn't
on television, and is a natural outgrowth of a hyperconsumerist
society-the "society of the spectacle," to use Guy
Debord's famous phrase. How can Americans be distracted, and
therefore be content to buy things as a substitute for meaningful
participation in their own society, unless there is a cornucopia
to catch their attention? Pictures provide a part of this
distraction.
Sontag
took this a step further, noting that "photography is
acquisition in several forms," as a surrogate possession,
a consumer's relation to events, as an acquisition of information
and furnishing knowledge independent of experience.9 But photography's
utility extends to the nation as a whole, Sontag declared:
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
subjectify reality and to objectify
it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen
them."10
Of
course, the camera can point more than one way, and is a convenient
tool of demonstrators and others - the police generally don't
attack when the cameras are watching. Arthur C. Clarke's maxim
that there are no evil technologies, only evil uses of technology,
however much we may quibble with it, rings true in regard
to the camera. If the American bourgeoisie ever decide to
go completely to the dark side, they will surely not want
the counter-revolution to be televised. Or photographed. The
ubiquity of cameras would work against them, caught in a consumerist
contradiction that we, Surrealist or not, can appreciate.
1
Susan Sontag, On Photography [Picador, New York], page 17
2 ibid, pages 106-107
3 ibid, page 109
4 ibid, page 32
5 ibid, page 35
6 ibid, pages 74-75 (emphasis in original).
7 ibid, pages 81-82
8 ibid, page 10
9 ibid, pages 155-156
10 ibid, page 178
|
