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what would susan sontag make of flickr? 
07.21.2006, 1:50 AM
The other day I read John Berger's 1978 essay, "The Uses of Photography," in which he reflects upon the ideas in Susan Sontag's seminal book, On Photography.
Berger quotes Sontag:
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resource, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. 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.
Then he raises the question of whether there is a new way to conceive of the social purpose and practice of photography:
Her theory of the current use of photographs leads one to ask whether photography might serve a different function. Is there an alternative photographic practice? The question should not be answered naively. Today no alternative professional practice (if one thinks of the profession of photographer) is possible. The system can accommodate any photograph. Yet it may be possible to begin to use photographs according to a practice addressed to an alternative future.. . . . For the photographer this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but, rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed [emphasis added]. The distinction is crucial.
The passage in bold above hit me like a ton of bricks. I happen to be staying in a place in Sardinia where I try to go every summer — the most beautiful place I've ever been to. It's a private home and the midday meal is important. All the guests and staff eat together on a shaded platform looking out at a remarkable island 2 miles long by 1500 ft high, just a mile offshore (think Ayres Rock rising out of the water rather than planted in the desert). The food is almost all grown on the property or caught in the sea at our doorstep. The friendships are strong and the recipes are local; the result is about as perfect as a meal can be — perfectly in synch with time and place. I've made it a habit each day to photograph the food as it is laid out buffet style. I do this for myself but also for "foodie" friends back home. After reading Berger's note above I realized how wrong-headed my reportage has been. I'm now trying to re-think what it would mean to take the same photographs, not as a reporter to the rest of the world, but rather as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed.
Berger goes on to suggest that key to a new photographic practice is the construction of context:
The alternative use of photographs which already exist leads us back once more to the phenomenon and faculty of memory. The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.
Photographs preserve an instant in an ocean of time. They require context to give them meaning. Thus my photographs of beautiful dishes do not include any hint of the effort required to grow and prepare it, the sublime surroundings in which both cooks and guests eat together, or the feelings of well-being that the experience engenders in us all.
Which in turn brings me to the question of this post . . . what would Susan Sontag have made of Flickr? Berger writes, "The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory." Originally, it seems, Flickr was conceived simply as a personal repository of images. In that sense it provides no antidote to the current practice of photography. However, as it grows into a social network, where individuals begin to provide context and meaning to images, is it possible that Flickr could be a step to a new practice of photography. If so, what sorts of functionality need to be developed for Flickr and other related tools?
Posted by bob stein on July 21, 2006 01:50 AM
tags: flickr, john_berger, journalism, photography, social_software, susan_sontag
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