Office: HGH 210; phone: (408) 924-5378
Email: wooda@email.sjsu.edu
Web: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda
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Dr. Andrew Wood Office: HGH 210; phone: (408) 924-5378 Email: wooda@email.sjsu.edu Web: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda |
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Reading: Sontag, S. (1999). On photography. In D. Crowley & P. Hayer’s (Eds.), Communication in history: Technology, culture, society (pp. 174-178). New York: Longman.
In
her excerpted essay, "On Photography," Susan Sontag explores the power of photography
to reshape our experience of the world and, ultimately, to render that experience
more significant than the real thing, to create "souvenirs of daily life" (p.
175). An important component of photography is its portability - the ability
to appropriate any object or person without the constraints suffered by other
media.
Even more importantly, the photographic image (increasingly in the digital age) is editable: "Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out" (p. 174). Ironically, because photographs are imagined to be transparent depiction of the world, they are used for purposes of surveillance and control, particularly of "increasingly mobile populations" (p. 175). Still, the image cannot exist without the editorial power of composition and framing employed by the photographer.
Photography also serves to democratize experience, rendering each image interchangeable. Again, the digital age reaffirms this claim, especially since any artfully created image found online can be altered, edited, and acquired for the "creative" efforts of any other person with an internet account and some software.
As a tool of tourism, the camera serves to document the acts of consumption that seem so critical to modern travel: " 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. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are most likely to be exacerbated by travel" (p. 177).
Perhaps the most important quality of photography is its power to fashion a broader experience of community and clan than exists in the "nuclear family" and its contemporary cousins. Here, the age of mobility and its impact on families meets its postmodern response: the creation of images devoid of reality: a photograph-family even better than the real thing.
Activities
Sontag states that there is "an aggression implicit in every use of the camera" (p. 175). What does she mean by this claim? Do you agree? For your Show and Tell activity, employ a specific photograph to support or negate her claim.
The image (to the right) is a picture of a red-light camera, placed at an intersection to photograph motorist activities and store evidence of wrongdoing. Are red-light cameras ethical? For your Show and Tell activity, identify two or three specific and well supported arguments to support one side of this question. In your comments, focus on the notion of "increasingly mobile populations" described by Sontag.