On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977.
Contents[edit]
In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography. Among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus's work with that of Depression-era documentary photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration.
She also explores the history of American photography in relation to the idealistic notions of America put forth by Walt Whitman and traces these ideas through to the increasingly cynical aesthetic notions of the 1970s, particularly in relation to Arbus and Andy Warhol.
Sontag argues that the proliferation of photographic images had begun to establish within people a "chronic voyeuristic relation"[1] to the world around them. Among the consequences of photography is that the meaning of all events is leveled and made equal. This idea did not originate with Sontag, who often synthesized European cultural thinkers with her particular eye toward the United States.
As she argues, perhaps originally with regard to photography, the medium fostered an attitude of anti-intervention. Sontag says that the individual who seeks to record cannot intervene, and that the person who intervenes cannot then faithfully record, for the two aims contradict each other. In this context, she discusses in some depth the relationship of photography to politics.
Criticism and acclaim[edit]
On Photography won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1977 and was selected among the top 20 books of 1977 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.
In 1977, William H. Gass, writing in The New York Times, said the book "shall surely stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon the subject" of photography.[2]
In a 1998 appraisal of the work, Michael Starenko, wrote in Afterimage that "On Photography has become so deeply absorbed into this discourse that Sontag's claims about photography, as well as her mode of argument, have become part of the rhetorical 'tool kit' that photography theorists and critics carry around in their heads."[3] He added that "no other photography book, not even The Family of Man (1955), which sold four million copies before finally going out of print in 1978, received a wider range of press coverage than On Photography." [4]
Sontag's work is literary and polemical rather than academic. It includes no bibliography, and few notes. There is little sustained analysis of the work of any particular photographer and is not in any sense a research project as often written by doctoral students. For example, in her discussion of The Family of Man exhibition she quotes almost word-for-word Roland Barthes' critique in his book Mythologies, without acknowledgement; "By purporting to show that individuals are born, work, laugh, and die everywhere in the same way, "The Family of Man" denies the determining weight of history - of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts." Many of the reviews from the world of art photography that followed On Photography at the time of its publication were skeptical and often hostile, such as those of Colin L. Westerbeck and Michael Lesy.
In 2003, Sontag published a partial refutation of the opinions she espoused in On Photography in her book Regarding the Pain of Others. This book may be considered as a postscript or addition to On Photography. Sontag's publishing history includes a similar sequence with regard to her work Illness as Metaphor from the 1970s and AIDS and Its Metaphors a decade later, which included an expansion of ideas contained in the earlier work.
論攝影
ON PHOTOGRAPHY
作者 ／ SONTAG, SUSAN 蘇珊．桑塔格
譯者 ／ 黃翰荻
出版社 ／ 唐山；
出版日期 ／ 1997/10/01
商品語言 ／ 中文/繁體
裝訂 ／ 平裝
內容簡介
從一開始，攝影便指向了捕捉最大可數目的題材，可是繪畫從沒有這麼帝國主義式的視野，後來攝影科技產業化的實現，乃是因為攝影在一開始時便與生俱來的許諾──以「譯成影像」的方式，「平等」一切經驗。
攝影家被想成一位銳利但不帶干擾性質的觀察者──一位書記而非詩人。但是當人們很快發現，沒有兩個人能就同一件事拍出相同的照片，相機能夠提供非個人的客觀影像的臆想，便向「相片不僅證明那兒存在著怎樣的東西，而且是某個個人看見了什麼」以及「照片並非僅是記錄，而且是一種對於世界的評價」這樣的事實投降。
攝影影像的終極智慧是說：「那是表面。現在，想，或者更正確地說──感覺，或用你的直覺去體會、捕捉，在那之上的是什麼東？如果它看起來是這個樣子，那麼真正的現實會是怎麼樣？」照片是對懷疑、推論和幻想的無盡邀請，它本身無法解釋任何事情。On Photography READ AN EXCERPT ________________________________________________________ | ||
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Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism (1977)
"Susan Sontag has written a book of great importance and originality. . . . All future discussion or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." —John Berger "After Susan Sontag, photography must be written about not only as a force in the arts, but as one that is increasingly powerful in the nature and destiny of our global society." —Newsweek "Not many photographs are worth a thousand of (Susan Sontag's) words." —Robert Hughes, Time Magazine "On Photography is to my mind the most original and illuminating study of the subject." —Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker "Every page of On Photography raises important and exciting questions about its subject and raises them in the best way." —The New York Times Book Review "A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have been made in our way of looking at the world and at ourselves over the last 140 years." —The Washington Post Book Worldy | |
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