Photography

When it comes to photography, I have always been amazed at how small of a field it captures within the realms of both space and time.  I have a home-made pinhole camera (which I will be bringing in for class today), the shortest recommended exposure time is 1/4^th of a second.  Fractions of a second sound really fast, but 1/4^th of a second is actually considered a really long time when taking photographs; if you were to try to take pictures of a sporting event, you would be very disappointed with the way your pictures turn out… unless you were really wanting a colorful swarm of blurry figures.  But not only does a photograph capture a very small fraction of a second, it also, as Sontag states, immortalizes it.

This very precise range of time is touched upon slightly throughout Sontag’s essay, though I don’t feel as though she discusses the topic to its full degree.  She does discuss how even the most professional, posed, and basic of photos (such as mug shots or your driver’s license photo) are art forms; what she doesn’t discuss is how timing is used to make it an individualistic practice.  Photography captures a very specific field of time and space, from a perspective that only the photographer knows.

I also found interesting her claims that photography occurred during an event, and the event is something worth photographing; it becomes interconnected to the point that “picture-taking is an event in itself” (as she says on the fifth page of our unnumbered handout).  This is a phenomenon that is still very relevant; entire websites and phone apps are dedicated just to pictures of events (Instagram and Snapchat are just two of the most popular examples) with people constantly sharing these events with others. 

However, I found her discussion of the camera being like a gun to be a bit over the top.  I agree with her points to an extent, but I feel like it’s a perspective that she took to a bit of an extreme.  Taking pictures of people does, to an extent, violate them; you see them in a moment, in a state, that would otherwise never have been noticed.  It’s an invasion of privacy, yes, but I wouldn’t say that it allows the photographer to have “knowledge of [the subject] they can never have.”  Rather, it’s an invasion of time, it immortalizes them in a state that they may not wish to have immortalized (think about the last time an unflattering picture was taken of you for example); people know that they can’t always look their best, it’s not a knowledge that they lack.  However, they don’t necessarily want that period of time to be as immortalized as a photograph allows it to be.

Comments

[DrMartinek]

Kendra:

First, thanks for taking the time to bring the cameras on Thursday. I'm sorry we did not have time for you to talk about them and I'm grateful that you agreed to do so on Tuesday. It's important to hear from a photographer in all this.

Sontag is most definitely not a photographer and many photographers find her hostile to their work (see quotes on front page of this website). She is only casually interested, from time to time, in the testimony of photographers and never interested at all in the technical details. She's viewing photography from the perspective of a cultural critic (some would say europhile "cafe intellectual"). This is the old-fashioned rambling essay tradition, going back to Montaigne in the 16th C, where the essayist is really just exploring his/her own mind and impressions and associations, not giving a technical or scholarly or authoritative exposition on a subject.

Many have zeroed in, as you have, in her extreme statements about the camera as a gun-substitute and all her talk about picture-taking as "stalking, murdering," etc. She certainly does so "aggression" and "acquisitiveness" in all acts of photography, though not always a murderous type.

I appreciate your reflections at the end about photography immortalizing people in ways they may not wish. Take a look at the handout I have you called "The Boston Photographs" by Nora Ephron about an extreme case of "photographic ethics" -- do we have a right to "immortalize" someone's last moment of life---when they know they are about to die (and perhaps have their child die as well)? How do we reconcile the fact that an automatic shot camera captured this unforgettable image? That it's a great photograph in every technical and aesthetic way. What does this example provoke in us when we are debating the status of photographic knowledge, photography as art, as journalism, as a record of what actually happens to human beings?

Grade: 3