or how relevant they continue to be. Jul 11, Prerna on-semi-hiatus rated it really liked it Shelves: reading-goalsart-and-art-theorynon-fictionmarxist-influences-applied-marxism. If only Sontag was alive today, there would be two more brilliant chapters at least about digital photography and selfie culture! Anyone who reads this having previously nurtured an interest in photography at any level should experience a de Like many people before me, I felt a certain dread the next time I tried to pick up my camera after reading this book. May 04, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: 20th-centurywritingsusan sontag essay on photography, criticismhistoryessay susan sontag essay on photography, artsphotographynon-fictionunited-states. Susan Sontag's incredible, penetrating critique of photography doesn't just cast into doubt the value of the activity of taking a photograph, but it posits some of the irrevocable changes that the advent of this technology has had on our world and how we experience it.
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Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — On Photography by Susan Sontag. On Photography by Susan Sontag. First published inthis is a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Susan sontag essay on photography develops further the concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering First published insusan sontag essay on photography, this is a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality.
When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society. Get A Copy. PaperbackNew Editionpages, susan sontag essay on photography. Published by Penguin first published More Details Original Title. National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Other Editions All Editions Add a New Edition Combine.
Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about On Photographyplease sign up. It is a very good book, I like it too much. like 28 days ago Add your answer. like 4 months ago Add your answer. See all 5 questions about On Photography…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of On Photography. Jun 04, Trevor I sometimes get notified of comments rated it it was amazing · review of another edition Shelves: social-theoryartphilosophyphotography.
This was terribly interesting, but I think you needed to know a little more than Sontag explained to understand where she is coming from in all this. The important thing to remember is that Plato wanted to banish the artists and he wanted to do this for a very good reason. Change and death, to Plato, are This was terribly interesting, but I think you needed to know a little more than Sontag explained to understand where she is coming from in all this. So, Plato saw the world we live in as a world of shadows, that is, one step away from reality. Art was therefore two steps away from reality and was therefore a copy of a copy. For Plato what we needed to do was get closer to reality, not further away from it.
Therefore, he needed to banish artists from his ideal society as they move us susan sontag essay on photography from reality towards images - that is more shadows. So, for as long as we have had idealist philosophy we have had a problem between images, reality and how we can go about understanding the differences between the one and the other. This might sound like quite a trivial problem, but it is actually incredibly important. As Margaret Wertheim shows in her The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internethow we have understood space has fundamentally changed how we have understood reality. So, God is huge and the angels are somewhat smaller and the king is smaller still, and the rest of us are tiny. The Renaissance developed perspective painting and with it helped to create the revolution in science that required a revolution in how we saw space, not as a frame for morality to be played out within, but as a plane for the unraveling of amoral and disinterested forces.
When the notion of reality changes, so does that of the image, and vice versa, susan sontag essay on photography. Plato would have had serious problems with photography. His main problem would have been the seeming accuracy of photographs. Photographs make normative an experience of art that is mediated, second-hand, intense in a different way. They lie because they are a selective choice of what reality we intent to show. They lie because most photographs are anything but what people think they are — an accurate representation of what is photographed. This point needs a bit of explaining. Think about what happens to you when someone holds a camera up towards you, susan sontag essay on photography.
It is nearly impossible not to pose. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. But a camera — a still camera at least — cannot capture the process of life. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand. And this is where the caption comes in. We look at the image and we see time frozen. We see a captured instant in what, to be understood, needs to be a continuum. It talks through the mouth of the text written beneath it. The Greek word for truth is Aletheia. It means to uncover, unconceal.
While Plato is seeking to get us to turn away from reality to see the reality susan sontag essay on photography the apparent, photography also gets us to turn away from the real world, but as a way to get us to see the real world that is hidden in plane sight. And, being hidden, is something to be unveiled. Painting is clearly an art form — and not just for the snobbish reason that it has a history going back as far as people go back, but also because to paint is to interpret, susan sontag essay on photography. To susan sontag essay on photography is to put something of yourself into a painting. But it is very hard for a photographer to be truly original in the way painters can be. Of course, this is anything but the case, but we will get to that in a second.
This is still the aim of most amateur photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph of something beautiful, like a woman, a sunset. Worse than this, not only have photographs turned everything into the potentially beautiful, but by presenting so many objects before us as objects of erotic or voyeuristic pleasure I mean this in the broadest possible sense photography is guilty of dulling our senses to the truly horrible. Sometimes the opposite is also the case. At one point she describes going to see an operation performed in a Chinese hospital — she observed susan sontag essay on photography and although it sounds gruesome in all the ways we expect operations to be, she was able to watch the whole thing with more fascination than revulsion.
That vulnerability is part of the distinctive passivity of someone who is a spectator twice over, spectator of events already shaped, first by the participants and second by the image maker. She makes wonderful use of a few stories from China about what makes a good photograph. She discusses a series of photographs taken by a Western photographer that the Chinese protested against. These showed rather candid photographs of the Chinese going about their daily lives. The Chinese critic found that idea repulsive about the photographs, susan sontag essay on photography. The people photographed had been violated because they had not been given the opportunity to present themselves to the camera.
Also, the images focused on parts of objects and of people. This too was seen by the Chinese as disrespectful. Yet again, another hidden truth. But if she is savage about Communist propaganda photography, she is hardly soft on Capitalist propaganda photography either, susan sontag essay on photography. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex, susan sontag essay on photography. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural susan sontag essay on photography, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.
Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle for masses and as an object of surveillance for rulers. The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself.
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Like Like. That most of the skill of an artist comes from making the most of whatever materials he has to hand and that the constraints are part of what fires creativity. Making something beautiful or interesting out of the ordinary and every day is surely the ultimate expression of this and you are so, so good at it. The door may, in reality, not be that small, but the immenseness of the wall makes it seem so. The sun is back full force, which means spring is not far behind. Great post, Lorianne. Interesting subject. Your posts are now my first stop every day: proof that creation is not playing to an empty house.
This particularly rich entry sent me straight to William Carlos Williams:. WHEN I was younger it was plain to me I must make something of myself. Older now I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor: roof out of line with sides the yards cluttered with old chicken wire, ashes, furniture gone wrong; the fences and outhouses built of barrel staves and parts of boxes, all, if I am fortunate, smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors. Euan, very interesting comment about computer art. Actually, many Real Photographers criticize digital photography for the same reason: the technology makes it too easy.
One of those happy accidents that pop up accidentally under your typing keys… Yes, the little door is that little: actually, this particular building is very weird because it has no front, just brick walls with all sorts of random bricked- and boarded-up doors. For example, a photographer will capture images of a disaster rather than helping the victims of that disaster. I feel the same way about the art that I post. None of it is high-quality, frameable art. None of it is more than my daily playing with pen and pencils and crayons in my journal. But the creating of it each day brings me untold joy. I share it to share my joy, and to show that art can be your constant friend, your soulmate, your everyday sacred, even as a rank amateur what exactly is a rank amateur?
Blog at WordPress. Home About Person Place Thing Contact Hoarded Ordinaries Mundane musings from a collector of the quotidian. Share this: Click to share on Facebook Opens in new window Click to share on Twitter Opens in new window Click to share on Reddit Opens in new window Click to share on LinkedIn Opens in new window Click to email this to a friend Opens in new window Click to print Opens in new window. Like this: Like Loading Tom Montag Says:. Euan Says:. Kathleen Says:. commonbeauty Says:. Gary Says:. Built upon the analysis of their precedent in the topic, Rock and Kaufman proposed an alternative explanation — the apparent distance hypothesis. Rock and Kaufman performed an extensive experiments described in their paper Moon Illusion, II, arguing that change in the pattern of distance cues may be what cause the illusion to happen.
They explained that the buildings and trees on the extended terrain presented with the moon oriented near horizon indicated the moon to be far away. The zenith moon, however, do not have these cues present as reference, therefore perceived as closer. When the visual angles of perceiving two objects were identical, but distance judged to be different by the observer, the less distant object would be considered to be the…. When speaking to different photographers they all have one idea in common in that they want to express their emotion onto you with out having to say one word, whether verbally or in a texted format.
Does the scene evoke a special emotion? Is there something pleasing to the eye? The Moon only reflects about twelve percent of the light that hits it because of its rugged, and dark surface. The position of which the Moon is at while orbiting can also affect the light that we get from it. For example, when the Moon is full it could be up to twenty percent brighter than it normally would be. The most popular theory of how the Moon was formed is that the Moon was once part of a larger celestial body, about the size of Mars. During the formation of the Earth, the celestial body collided with the Earth, causing debris to fly into orbit, which then slowly came together and made up a celestial object, the Moon.
If Jupiter did not exist, the threat from asteroids might be much smaller, since the objects that make up the asteroid belt might instead have become part of a planet. On the other hand, the threat from comets might be much greater. The shadow of the Moon blocks out light from the sun onto earth, while in a Lunar Eclipse the order goes: Sun, Earth, Moon with the shadow of the Earth blocking sunlight which illuminates the moon. Angular Diameters is a measurement describing how large a circle appears from a certain point of view. An Annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon moves to cover the sun, but does not cover it fully.
Creating a ring of fire effect! Surprisingly, water on the side of the Earth facing away from the moon can also experience high tide. Interestingly enough, these seas can experience high tide due to the moon and the Earth revolving together around a center of mass. The relationship between the Earth and the moon is characterized by gravity acting as a rope, pulling the Earth and the moon together. As gravity causes these bodies to become more attracted to each other, centrifugal…. Home Flashcards Create Flashcards Essays Essay Topics Writing Tool.
Essays Essays FlashCards. Browse Essays. Sign in. Flashcard Dashboard Essay Dashboard Essay Settings Sign Out. Home Page Analysis Of Susan Sontag's On Photography. Analysis Of Susan Sontag's On Photography Words 5 Pages Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. Related Documents Apollo The Man On The Moon The moon is the brightest object in the night sky. Read More. Words: - Pages: 5. Penumbra And Solar Eclipses The sun is a bright, burning ball of light, so much like anything bright we tend to not look at it.
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