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Description
Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag. Women. New York: Random House, 1999. 248 pages. Hardback, $139.99; Paper, $49.95
In On Photography (1977) Susan Sontag argues that photographs have the ability to change and expand our conceptions of the images that are both worthy of our observation and permissive of our gaze. Photographs represent a language of portrayal while embodying the ethical imperatives of cultural signification. A photograph provides a moment of actuality--it is a presencing of a moment, a depiction of the material experience of an object, scene, or individual, and a historical document. But a photograph also reflects a pseudo-absence. The full presencing of the subject can never take place in an image; once a moment is captured in stasis that moment becomes subject to interpretation and conjecture. Thus an image is not to be equated with disclosure. Understanding, Sontag argues, is supposed to begin when one realizes that the world is not what one tacitly apprehends. The photograph provides access to depictions of beauty (such as a panorama) that are inaccessible to the eye. By... |
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