Susan Sontag: A New Visual Code

A new visual code

In her Essay On Photography Sontag says that the evolution of modern technology has changed the viewer in three key ways. She calls this the emergence of a new visual code.

Firstly, Sontag suggests that modern photography, with its convenience and ease, has created an overabundance of visual material. As photographing is now a practice of the masses, due to a drastic decrease of camera size and increase of ease in developing photographs, we are left in a position where “just about everything has been photographed” (Sontag, Susan, (1977), On Photography 3). We now have so many images available to us of: things, places, events and people from all over the world, and of not immediate relevance to our own existence, that our expectations of what we have the right to view, want to view or should view has been drastically affected. Arguably, gone are the days that we felt entitled to view only those things in our immediate presence or that affected our micro world; we now seem to feel entitled to gain access to any existing images. “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe” (3). This is what Sontag calls a change in the “ethics of seeing” (3).

Secondly, Sontag comments on the effect of modern photography on our education, claiming that photographs “now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present”(4). Without photography only those few people who had been there would know what the Egyptian pyramids or the Parthenon look like, yet most of us have a good idea of the appearance of these places. Photography teaches us about those parts of the world that are beyond our touch in ways that literature can not.

Thirdly, Sontag also talked about the way in which photography desensitizes its audience. Sontag introduced this discussion by telling her own story of the first time she saw images of horrific human experience. At twelve years old, Sontag found images of holocaust camps and was so distressed by them she says “When I looked at those photographs something broke... something went dead, something is still crying” (20). Sontag argues that there was no good to come from her seeing these images as a young girl, before she fully understood what the holocaust was. For Sontag the viewing of these images has left her a degree more numb to any following horrific image she viewed, as she had been desensitized. According to this argument, “Images anesthetize” and the open accessibility to them is a negative result of photography (20).

Sontag examines the relationship between photography and reality. Photographs are depicted as a representation of realism. Sontag claimed that “such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image, an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real (Sontag, Susan (1982), The Image World 350). It is a resemblance of the real as the photograph becomes an extension of the subject. However, the role of the photograph has changed, as copies destroy the idea of an experience. The image has altered to convey information and become an act of classification. Sontag highlights the notion that photographs are a way of imprisoning reality- making the memory stand still. Ultimately images are surveillance of events that trigger the memory. In modern society, photographs are a form of recycling the real. When a moment is captured it is assigned a new meaning as people interpret the image in their own manner. Sontag claims that images desensitize the reality, as people's perceptions are distorted by the construction of the photograph. However this has not stopped people from consuming images; there is still a demand for more photographs.

Sontag observed some uses of photography, “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation” (Sontag,1977 10), such as memorizing and providing evidence. She also states that “to collect photographs is to collect the world.” (Sontag,1997 3)

Sontag believes that photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. She states that photography has ‘become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation’.^[15] She refers to photographs as memento mori, where to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability and mutability. The progression from written word to an image shifts the interpretation from the author to the receiver. Sontag believes however that ‘photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire’.^[16] It is a slice in time and in effect, is more memorable than moving images for example, videos. It fills the gaps in our mind of the past and present.^[17] Even though photography has such effect, there are limits to photographic knowledge of the world. The limitations are that it can never be interpreted ethical or political knowledge.^[18] It will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. ^[18]