On Reading On Photography
Photography as a form of note taking, as a memory aid, or as a replacement for experience itself.
Sontag’s On Photography is one of those great essay collections where every other line there is something that challenges — that doesn’t merely ask “agree or disagree?” (the lowest form of engagement with any reading material) — but rather makes you mull & simmer, reconsider your art and how you view it. I’ll be in the middle of washing my hands when lightning (some resonant passage from her writing) splits open my skull mid-suds.
I mean just look at this opening line!
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth
photography as a form of note-taking
spot the difference:
I think my photography practice distills down to two states:
As the auteur — I am moving, contorting, actively framing and shaping reality, teasing the camera into capturing that precious Kraft Single slice of time and space in the most true version as it is revealed to me. Sontag dismisses “photographic seeing” as dissociative, one that “creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature,” but I’d argue that I’m feeling each granular moment more acutely than if I had let it slide over me, slinking quickly around the corner as is the nature of time. By attempting to freeze the present do you not hold it more precious, more open to scrutiny, than by just passing through?
As the documentarian — I am whipping out your reporter’s notebook and jotting down a visual note. I’m scribbling down existence in the form of image. It is photography as a memory aid, as a method of collating (especially nowadays with screenshotting) things for future reference, for evidence of its existence. It is the unglamorous photo of the humble banana almond butter toast I had for breakfast, it is the selfie of my swollen jaw, it is a screenshot of a book recommendation. It is everyday life apotheosized as a digital memo. The photograph functions a pictorial journal entry.
For the most part, I operate as the documentarian.
Note-taking is a habit essential to life; pens and stray paper are strewn throughout the home for a scribble at a moment’s notice. As I child I used to keep a pencil under my pillow to scribble late-night thoughts on my bedroom wall until I realized that graphite was harder to scrub from textured walls than I thought. As an adult, I’ve accumulated thousands of assorted jottings (journal entries, silly little quotes, doodles galore, tragic pasta sauce stains) in “Everything Notebooks.” Handwritten notes range from the practical “buy leafy greens and fresh butter” to whimsical turns of phrase that sprout in the mind like abandoned chia seeds in my sink. When Sontag praises photographs (as “unpremeditated slices of the world… clouds of fantasy and pellets of information”) she could just as easily be describing the written note. Photos are as tangible a snapshot of the mental state as any post-it note scribble.
what will i do with all these photos
At some point though, I really need to get a handle on my image count
damn.
It is truly appalling. It haunts me. It may take me a decade to get through all these notes. I try to organize them by album (digi-notebook) but ultimately some pictures elude me. Whereas some photos bring back an instantaneous gobsmack of memory “The stewed oxtail tapas in Sevilla! The moss-covered temple in Kyoto!” sometimes I scroll and wonder: why did I take photo of this bathroom tile? Did something about that crack in the wall tickle my fancy? and of course “oh wow I forgot about that rash. Never did figure out what it was, but I’m glad it wasn’t [insert what WebMD told me here].”
To be a rascal here and quote Sontag: “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” Such is the adventure of scrolling through my smörgåsbord of iCloud photos.
surrealist montage in the form of photodumps
Though written in the context of the newest point-and-shoot film camera, when Sontag condemns photography as the “quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies”, she prophesies the modern age’s ubiquity of high quality phone cameras in the pocket of every middle class American today.
Photographs, which turn the past into a consumable object, are a short cut. Any collection of photographs is an exercise in Surrealist montage and the Surrealist abbreviation of history.
The iClouds of a billion people across the world, filled with hundreds of casual selfies, thousands of cute fuzzy pet photos, food pictures taken in dark restaurants, pretty skies, weird bumps on their arms, make for a fine collection of Surrealist montage indeed.
Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.
two examples of personal surrealist montage:
the futility of capturing every experience // photography as a replacement for experience itself
One final thing:
[Photographs] help people take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism… It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made that the program was carried out, that fun was had…. A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir
That last line calls to mind all the restaurants and bars, all the festivals and music concerts, all the third-(or is it fourth now? god help us)-wave coffee shops with their infinitely Instagrammable decor and drinks aestheticized to the point of impracticality. People go out of their way to visit places like these. The most disappointing restaurants I know in Seattle are places that have invested so much in creating an ~ ambiance ~ for the young working professional with money to blow and instagram stories to fill that they’ve completely forgotten their primary charge.
Experiences are now desirable because they’d preserve well as a photograph. The pumpkin patch is a cute way to herald your instagram into fall. Photography is the way we experience things now, and the more beautiful the photograph the more beautiful the experience in retrospect.
I’m not immune to this. I can’t tell you how devastating it is to realize when you’re having a wonderful night out on the town with friends in the middle of a grimy dim-lit dive bar scarfing down a fresh basket of the world’s ugliest delicious misshapen cajun tots that if you whipped out your phone, it would be the blurriest trash picture in the world. And yet you do it anyway. Because if you didn’t, you’d be haunted by the spectre of that lost experience, that you didn’t record the moment in some tangible form besides living in it.
daily ephemera
If you’ve made it this far, congrats! I’m a few weeks into surgery recovery and possibly delirious from the meds, so take every word and opinion with a grain — no, Maldon flake — of salt.
Current obsessions: high quality wool socks as every day wear. Crocheting absurdly impractical objects. Microwaveable heat packs for the face.
I’m listening to: new alex g, new alvvays
I’m eating (drinking, really): endless smoothies, bowls of silky steamed egg with sesame oil
I’m feeling: immensely emotional over fragrant ginger fish soup with tofu. Infinitely grateful for my mother.
I’m reading: so so many things. The first two weeks after surgery were a whirlwind of Asian American identity novels (not all of them good, sadly) and vaguely unnerving translated Korean short stories.
why do so many AA memoirs (especially Chinese American) fall flat for me? is it because I’m too close to the subject matter? Do I find the trauma quotidian because I live it? More on this later
Recommendation du jour: conduct an audit of the Surrealist personal-history montage known as “every photo you have ever taken in this life.” Weep, gnash your teeth, and shake your fists at the heavens (the Cloud).
