Sontag Essay

Susan Sontag’s essay, “In Plato’s Cave” addresses many interesting points about photography.  Her point of view is not clear on many of these points, but she does make clear the importance of photography. Photographs are fact that something existed or happened. Writers or painters cannot prevent their opinions or bias from entering into their writing or art. Sontag contrasts photography with other forms of art by saying that it is less of a statement from the artist and more of a miniature of the world. Photography is different from other art because it is not one of opinion. It is capturing the world as it is and viewing it as art.

Photography gives validity to one’s life. To not photograph a child is viewed as neglect in modern society. Taking photographs of one’s life gives proof that not only one existed, but that it was worth living and worthy of reproducing. Photographs are often all that remains of extended family members. They allow someone to own a piece of a time in which they did not exist and a memory that they have no recollection of. Family photo albums began the idea of capturing those we love and the experiences we would not trade for gold.

This idea has turned into an obsession in tourists. Without pictures to remember a trip by the trip seems insignificant. The obsessive need to put a camera between the photographer and the beautiful can prevent the photographer from truly experiencing and appreciating the subject. Instead, the photographer is worried about lighting, angles and the perfect shot.  Sontag’s explanation for this compulsive behavior is of societies driven by work ethic. On vacation a tourist might feel the need to work on a task like they would in their day-to-day lives. Photographing the experience replaces the work they would be doing if they were not on vacation, “the photographer has the choice between a photograph and life, to choose the photograph” (Sontag 12).

Sontag first gives the idea that to photograph something is to give it validity, immortality. The object of a photograph is transformed into something beautiful, but she later contradicts herself. Her other opinion on the matter is that to take a photograph of something is to violate it. She describes the act of taking a picture to be predatory, “to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves”  (Sontag 14). To capture someone in an emotional state is to capture them while they are vulnerable. You capture for eternity a part of someone that they may not normally allow to be seen. You then turn this subject into an object. Their emotion may capture and infect a viewer, but they are reduced to an image.

Photographs have completely hanged how we view history because now we can actually view history.  Before we relied on stories, written accounts, things that can change from person to person. A photographic history allows the individual to see fact, and even that happened as it happened and allows the viewer to make his or her own opinions. Media broadcasts could have told the American Public about the atrocities of the Vietnam War, but it was not until they saw them with their own eyes that they were outraged. It has opened a whole new world and possibility in the educational world. Students are no longer simply told of what is happening, but they can see it.

Susan Sontag may be contradictory and redundant in her essay, “In Plato’s Cave”,  but she successfully informs the reader of the importance of photography in every field it has effected. She presents both positives and negatives to how we use photography in society. There can be no argument that photography is unimportant and insignificant in every part of modern society.