susan sontag: on photography

Lately I've become quite obsessed with reading.  Because of the course I am doing, all I read is photography and art related books. It is a whole new experience for me as I never read similar books before.  Some are easy to understand and get through but a few readings require more active brain cells that I will ever possibly have.  Still, those I enjoy, and most of them I do, engage me with a new world and they distract me from the days when I am feeling down and alone with my thoughts and dreams.  One of the books I enjoyed the most is

Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977).

I wanted to share a few quotes because they are simply beautiful:

 

"Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art.  Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.  An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer.  A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exist.  All photographs are memento mori.  To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.  Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."

 

"The photographer is a supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear.  The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences of find new ways to look at familiar subjects - to fight against boredom.  For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other."

 

"At the very beginning of photography, the late 1830s, William H. Fox Talbot noted the camera's special aptitude for recording: "the injuries of time".  Fox Talbot was talking about what happens to buildings and monuments.  For us, the more interesting abrasion are not of stone but of flesh. Through photographs we follow in the most intimate, troubling way the reality of how people age. To look at an old photograph of oneself, of anyone one has known, or of a much photographed public person is to feel, first of all:  how much younger I (she, he) was then.  Photography is the inventory of mortality."