A Tourist in Other People's Reality

By ROBERT HUGHES

ON PHOTOGRAPHY by Susan Sontag; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 207 pages; $7,95

"The best writing on photography,"Susan Sontag declares, "has been by moralists -- Marxists or would-be Marxists -- hooked on photographs but troubled by the way photography inexorably beautifies." The category includes its maker.

There are perhaps half a dozen critics in America whose silence would be a loss to writing itself, and Sontag is one of them. On Photography is not a history of photography. Nor is it a book about photographers. Instead, as the title declares, Sontag has elected to write a meditation on the medium itself.

Her timing is impeccable. The treatise comes in the middle of a boom: photographs now experience the same kind of inflation and distortion paintings did in the 1960s. Once the ignored art, photography now stands robed in puffery and armored with analysis; like painting, it has acquired its cast of heroes and poetes maudits. But not enough has been written on how photography acts on the real world: how it has altered our perceptions, our social relationships, our sense of reality. Such questions are fundamental. They haunt photographic criticism. But they seldom materialize as issues, despite the obvious fact that photography, and not painting, provides our chief visual images of the world and of ourselves.

The core of Sontag's argument is that photography is not an art: it is a language, a neutral medium. Its analogue is not painting but paint. "Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures and Atget's Paris."

Photography is omnivorous to the point of cannibalism. Indeed, its nature is to assimilate everything -- literally, to collect the world, to transform all reality into an infinity of images, nouns and verbs without a connecting syntax.

To a great extent this has been done. Nothing lies beyond the scope of the inquiring lens. The assimilation of the world goes on faster and faster; the camera furnishes us with our prototypes. "Instead of just recording reality," Sontag argues, "photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism." Nevertheless, the photo is a fiction: reality unfolds in time, and photographs do not. "Through photographs," Sontag writes, "the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles ... It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery." Photography isolates: it cannot narrate. "Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph .. . Only that which narrates can make us understand." Here, one may feel. Sontag exaggerates too sweepingly. If only narration gives cognition, every static visual image, from the bulls of Lascaux to the horse in Guernica, is condemned, by implication, to muteness. Goya's Third of May is an instant that epitomizes a massacre, not a narrative of the whole event. It shares that with photography, but who could say it does not enlarge our understanding of what it meant to be in a ravaged Spain?

Sontag is uneasy about the entire role of "concerned" photography. Holocaust victims, matchstick Biafran children, burnt Vietnamese--seen as products in the camera's neutral eye, she argues, these images of suffering become analgesic; they first stimulate the moral sense, then dull it by overload. There is a truth to that, but not the whole truth. No matter what one may say against the continual voyeurism of photography, the likelihood is that it played as great a role in finishing the Viet Nam War as the printed word did. (One main reason why civilians in England could tolerate the idea of trench warfare for so long, after 1916. was that they had extremely few photographs of it and so an insufficient sense of outrage.)

Among the most telling sections in Sontag's short book is an argument that emerges from the fragmented nature of photography: "The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own." This reality, Sontag urges, is rendered surrealist by the camera. Surrealist not in the banal sense of resembling a landscape with melting watches, but in its representations-- by definition disconnected, scattered and disturbing. The landscape of photographic images is to the modern eye what the flea market was to the sur realists 50 years ago -- an endless, random repository, a disorderly world parallel to the real one, stuffed with the pathos of nostalgia and secret messages about social organization. Photography, in this sense, is rather like Borges' "Aleph": it contains every possibility and no resolutions, but everything in it is equally interesting. And so, in a funamental way, it becomes a powerful tool of separation.

The camera is, it seems, the me chanical dandy par excellence. It is also the model of free choice. Sontag gives a wry account of the uses of photography in China, where "candid" shots are considered insulting and counterrevolution ary; there, photography, like every other mode of language, exists mainly to propagate ideology, and every image must be wholesome, posed, evenly lit, smiling; the camera is Big Brother's eye on the happy termitary. It is a repugnant alternative to the fragmented image, but, as Sontag gloomily concedes, there are no practicable alternatives.

It is hard to imagine any photographer's agreeing point for point with Sontag's polemic. But it is a brilliant, irritating performance, and it opens window after window on one of the great fails accomplis of our culture. Not many photographs are worth a thousand of her words.

Robert Hughes

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