Sontag + Barthes

After being saturated with images of photos and the manifestos accompanying them, to realize that all of this data has only real emerged in the past 40 years was shocking. Baudelaire provides an entrance into the study of photography as art, and while his justifications need support, I understand his concern. Art had remained within the mediums of painting, to a lesser extent drawing, and sculpture for what must have seemed like an eternity - what was photography to claim itself as art?

The comparison of Sontag and Barthes was refreshing in that it provided viewpoints that were either objective and wary or subjective and emotional. Both of these perspectives still resonate within the artworld and the study of photography in general, so I was pleased to experience the first voices to jump into such a weighted subject. Sontag's argument was appealing for the fact that she approached the medium through a feminist lens, but did not end up dismissing it for its voyeuristic functions. Feminist art, primarily from the 70's but also continuing into contemporary times, has relied on photography as a means of allowing female artists to depict themselves in ways that male artists would never show them while questioning the nature of the reproduced image at any turn. Sontag both critiques and praises photography - it may take away from the actually real life experience of an event, a phenomena we are all more than familiar with today - but it also "democracies experience" allowing anyone and everyone to make their own mundane perceptions relevant through the photograph. One aspect of Sontag's argument I was particularly drawn to was her discussion of photography as non-intervention. I've taken ethics classes before, as well as entire course on violence and non-violence, so understanding photography as an ethical endeavor is of extreme importance to me. I've viewed images of victims from the Vietnam war, heard interviews with their photographers, and it is traumatizing to see how much they are dedicated to their images to the point that they will allow innocent people to die and suffer for the sake of recording it.

Roland Barthes provided a completely different experience for viewing photographs - he did not try to hide the fact that the photograph is not the person that he can hold in his hand. However, I was entranced by his description of the photograph as a living thing, and his use of the metaphor of light to describe photos as decaying items reflecting light from a previous age. I have photographs of my grandparents, people I never met and will never have the chance to meet, yet somehow I feel like I can form some kind of infinitesimal relationship with them by observing their image. It is obviously not the person I am seeing, but a representation of them through another's eyes - often a loved one. This understanding is compounded by a lifetime of stories and experiences that others have passed down to me. I do not know my grandmother or grandfather, but I have some record of their existence, the fact that someone loved them enough to record that existence, in the albums and boxes that are scattered around my house. Despite having never lost someone very close to me, reading Barthes description of his mother evoked a number of similar responses from me. I understand the fear of the death of a parent and I know the experience of trying to recover that loved one through photographs taken of them. We cannot ever reclaim a person who is lost through photography, but the photo is still an object we can hold and view in order to bring this past life and experience into the present and find a way to deal with the fact that this will never be again.