On Photography “In Plato’s Cave” (1973)
Susan Sontag

Reality

The essay begins by complicating the relation between photographs and reality. Sontag observes that photographs are generally taken as proof that the scene depicted in them actually happened. In this sense, she describes them as “miniatures of reality,” implying that a photograph is understood to be a transparent record of the world. A glance at the title of Sontag’s essay reveals that Sontag does not adhere to this account of photography.

 

As we may recall, Plato’s Cave describes humans as though they are prisoners in a cave, where all they can see are shadows cast onto a wall. It is the job of the philosopher to leave the cave in order to see the world as it really is. With her title, Sontag implies that the photographs with which we are surrounded in our everyday lives are like the shadows on the wall of the cave. To think of photographs as little pieces of reality is to make a grave mistake.

 

Photographs, according to Sontag, are subject to the twin forces of taste and conscience. These are standards imposed on photographs which form a kind of selection process, admitting some and debarring others. Sontag sees in these standards a kind of aggression. Even (or perhaps) especially photographs which idealize the subject are identified as aggressive since they impose a set of pre-conceived standards onto the subject and project a skewed version of reality. 

 

Sontag also objects to the ubiquity of photographs. The very premise that anything can be photographed makes the world into “a set of potential photographs.” This is somewhat reminiscent of Adorno’s criticism of enlightenment rationalism which understands the world to be a set of measurable or testable entities. Sontag describes the scope of photography as “imperial.” It is an artistic enterprise which knows few boundaries in its relentless pursuit of capturing the world.

​

Taking photos

The essay spends much of its middle section discussing not photographs themselves, but the act of taking photos. As Sontag notes, it is an unusual form of art in that so many people do it: “photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.” Most photographers, therefore, are not artists. Instead, Sontag claims that photography has a ritual element and is used as a “defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.”

 

For example, taking photographs has become an essential element of the wedding ceremony. Families are not families without photo albums. As ties with the extended family weaken in the West, so photographs are used to “supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives.”

 

Taking photos also helps people to possess the unknown spaces that holidaymakers find themselves in. Photos prove that fun was had and “document sequences of consumption.” The camera also forms a barrier between tourists and their travel destinations. While pictures convert experiences into souvenirs, the taking of them substitutes the work which tourists have left at home.

​

Politics and photojournalism

Sontag changes gears as she turns to examine the work of photojournalists. We can scarcely imagine a newspaper without color photographs on every page (although Sontag notes that Le Monde, a leading French newspaper, has no photographs at all), and yet Sontag displays a deep suspicion of the ethics and complicity of photographers who supply images for the news.

 

It is worth quoting the essay at length:

 

The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself—so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed. While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all.

 

Photographing an event is an act of non-intervention. Whatever the event, the value of the resulting photograph is placed above whatever is happening in the event. People can be allowed to die so long as their death can be documented through the birth of a photograph. The immortality of the image makes it seemingly more powerful than the ethical demand to intervene in the event. 

 

More than non-intervention, then, photography is a kind of participation. Taking photographs is a tacit acceptance of the state of the world and for at least as long as it takes to compose a decent photograph, the event being pictured, no matter what it is, must be allowed to continue. Indeed, for the photographer, it is essential that it continues. Part of the horror of a horrific photograph is the knowledge that the photographer chose to take a picture rather than to intervene.

 

With this line of argument, Sontag rejects the possibility of standing to one side in a disinterested manner. A photographer connects with the event being photographed in a positive manner and enters into a kind of pact or complicity with it, even when the event involves “another person’s pain or misery.” 

​

Morality

One can imagine a photojournalist responding to the above argument by claiming that publishing images of other people’s pain and misery is a good way to stop it. They would likely argue for the morality of documenting violent events as a means of raising public awareness and therefore bringing about political change. But on the point of morality, Sontag is very clear: “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one.” In other words, photographs cannot engender new moral thoughts or ideas. If a photograph evokes a moral response, it is because it is tapping into a pre-existing moral stance. For example, Sontag mentions the famous 1972 photograph of a Vietnamese child during an American napalm attack. She concedes that it “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against

the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities,” but also claims that the picture is only powerful in the context of an existing public concern about the Vietnam War. By contrast, she notes that photographs of the violence and devastation of the preceding Korean War (1950-53) were not widely published in America. “The public did not see such photographs'' she claims, “because there was, ideologically, no space for them.” In other words, since there was broad consensual support for the war, there was no political consciousness in which to frame the photographs. Sontag’s point is that photographs are not, in themselves, powerful enough to make new moral arguments.

 

Photographs can, however, shock. Sontag describes seeing photographs of the holocaust for the first time at age 12. She describes the experience as wounding: “Nothing I have ever seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously.” This “negative epiphany” left her permanently damaged. The power of the images of concentration camps resides in their novelty. Nothing had prepared Sontag for the horrors of what she saw, but she claims that repeated exposure to images of the same event, no matter how horrific, have a numbing effect. 

 

The more atrocities that are seen, the more familiar they become. Eventually, they become normal. In the end, the more images that one sees, the less real the event seems.   She also notes that as time passes, and the “emotional charge” of photographs diminishes, an “aesthetic distance” is established. In other words, the event depicted is drawn away from the viewer who tends to see the photograph as an artistic object of admiration rather than as an account of a real event requiring a moral response. Although she does not explicitly make the connection, Sontag is arguing with Walter Benjamin on this point. She implies that photographs have not lost their auras to the degree that Benjamin claims.

 

Postmodernism

Sontag’s account of the photograph accords with the postmodern idea of fragmentation. “Photography reinforces a nominalist view of social reality as consisting of small units of an apparently infinite number” she writes.  “Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles.” In a world made of photographs, nothing joins up; there is no sense of interconnectivity. Instead of being able to see a bigger picture, photographs present the world as though it is made up of small, discrete and disparate entities. Photographs present us with an infinite array of surfaces which fail to explain anything. Hence, “Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.” The shallow nature of photographs means that they will only ever provide “a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom.”

 

For Sontag, the essence of understanding involves “not accepting the world as it looks.” She implies that the surface form of the world can never give a sufficient account of what is going on. Part of the reason for the insufficiency of photographs is that they, being snapshots in time, cannot articulate a sense of narrative which is required for genuine knowledge of the world. The upshot of this is that photographs can never provide political or ethical knowledge. In this sense, we can again see Sontag fundamentally disagreeing with Benjamin.

 

The mass production of photographs, however, creates the illusion of political or ethical knowledge:

 

The omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

 

Surrounded, as we are, by photographic images of the world, we have the impression that we know the world. After all, we know exactly what it looks like. But as we noted above, this is just “knowledge at bargain prices.” It is just the shallow and misleading surface form of things.

 

Sontag closes by observing that photographs have turned us all into “image-junkies,” where “having an experience becomes identical with taking a photo of it.” In the end, the act of taking a photograph has replaced actually experiencing our lives as we live them. A sobering thought in our photograph-saturated age.