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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Spiked Online has been pondering the role of photography in our culture in the wake of such phenomena as reality television and Iraqi prisoner abuse photos:"The growth of photography, said Sontag, was about taking a 'chronically voyeuristic relation to the world'. With camera in hand, the world and its occupants become prey for our amusement, with our subjects expected to pose, to expose themselves on film. The effect, said Sontag, 'is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation'...
As Sontag argued in On Photography, photos provide a false sense of understanding. 'Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.' It is the reduction of everything to surface impressions, giving up on the task of probing beneath appearance to find out why things look as they do."
It's a disturbing point. As a child I found my parents prediliction for photography irksome and saw the camera as a barrier between the subject and experience. Relying on photograhs rather than memory seemed a poor, vicarious experience at best. But as one grows older memory seems less of a certain quality and I now find myself behind the camera. Indeed, my photography often seems remorsely driven by a personal aesthetic, with considerable time spent waiting for a shot to be cleared of the human vermin that stand between my camera and the object of the photo. That object is usually architectural or artistic, reflecting a young fogey's love of past periods whose aesthetics and culture seem far more preferrable than our own in almost everything respect. Reality is most certainly turned into an object of aesthetic appreciation.Labels: Images
posted by Richard 10:39 pm
