On Photography by Susan Sontag

Review by: Rudolf Arnheim

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer, 1978), pp. 514-515
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
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 514
photographs of Leni Riefenstahl to trade
paperbacks to the performing arts. Movies and
Methods, however, only presents that section
of the essay which deals with Riefenstahl; al-
though this cutting is in keeping with an an-
thology about film, Sontag's essay ends up dis-
torted and lacking in much of its original
force. Furthermore, Nichols introduces the
essay with his comment that Sontag leaves
many areas of ideology unexplored, "including
those of special importance to feminist criti-
cism." Yet in an exchange with Adrienne Rich
on "Fascinating Fascism" published in The
New York Review of Books, Sontag anticipated
and answered such a charge by arguing that not
all issues, not all fascisms, directly relate to
questions of patriarchal oppression. This ex-
change should have been included or at least
cited in Movies and Methods.
The organizational principle of Movies and
Methods is somewhat problematic. Nichols has
divided the anthology into areas of concern,
and although he has tried to make these divi-
sions as useful as possible (through individual
bibliographies and excellent general introduc-
tions), the reasons for the divisions are less
explicit than they should be. The book has
three parts - Contextual Criticism, Formal Criti-
cism, and Theory - and each of these parts
contains chapters on more specific concerns.
For example, Contextual Criticism includes
Political Criticism, Genre Criticism, and Fem-
inist Criticism. But Nichols gives little indica-
tion as to how he has derived categories. Why,
for example, is feminist criticism not political?
Certainly the feminist movement may have
different political interests from other move-
ments but its goals are political.
Nor is it apparent why certain chapters be-
long where Nichols puts them. Formal Criti-
cism, for example, includes a section on auteur
criticism - the discussion of a film in terms of
its director. Yet one could make a strong case
for auteur criticism as a type of contextual
criticism: M.H. Abrams's famous discussion of
art's expressive mode demonstrates this point.
Furthermore the very division of the book is
suspect. Can criticism be separated from theory
in so definite a fashion? (Nichols is a Marxist,
so this separation of theory and critical prac-
tice seems additionally troublesome.) One of
the values of all the essays in Movies and Meth-
ods is that they are working out and working
from theoretical issues. To suggest that these
pieces are not theoretical is limiting.
And yet these organizational problems may
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R E V I EW S
well be ones that are inescapable in any film
anthology. In growing up, film criticism has
made ample use of developments in many
other disciplines from anthropology to informa-
tion theory. Consequently, virtually all major
recent film theorizing cuts across the divisions
that an anthology like Movies and Methods
sets up.
Scholars who are acquainted with the selec-
tions or the issues these selections deal with
will undoubtedly not find the organizational
confusions too distracting. The selections are
important ones, and Nichols has done film
theory a more than valuable service by assem-
bling them in one place. All in all, this is an
important book for anyone interested in con-
temporary film writing to own and use.
DANA B. POLAN
Stanford University
SONTAG,SUSAN.On Photography. N.Y.: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1977, 207 pp., $7.95.
The rhapsodic format of a book composed of
six previously published articles and an an-
thology of quotations suits Susan Sontag per-
fectly. She approaches her subject not by build-
ing an argument and interpreting the evidence
through reference to defined principles. Al-
though far from being superficial, she harvests
from the surface of photographic manifesta-
tions a multitude of symptoms, each shiny with
the high polish of intelligence. Photography
emerges from these pages as a remarkably com-
plete collection of social and psychological
indicators. Richly rewarded by the complexity
of Sontag's excursions, one nevertheless may
feel all the more encumbered when at the end
one asks, ungratefully: But what is photog-
raphy?
To adumbrate concepts by accumulating all
the bits of the evidence is a stimulating but
ultimately unsatisfying procedure. The prob-
lems are laundered by a churning rotation,
which turns up the same aspects again and
again and leaves relations and contradictions
unexplored. Sontag's third essay is the most
bewildering presentation of Surrealism I have
ever seen, and her dealings with "art" and
"beauty" are similarly elusive. There exists
a simple basic statement on photography, first
formulated by S. Kracauer, from which the
other principal properties of the medium can be
derived: photography is a collaboration of
directly imprinted optical reality and the
shaping powers of the mind. This double
Reviews
nature of the medium could serve to account
for the antinomies that appear unresolved in
Sontag's exposition: photography is timeless yet
anchored to a historical date; it mirrors reality
but also interprets and judges it; it suffers from
artful manipulation and profits from art; it
estranges but arouses compassion; it is helped
by accident and also by planning; it assaults
reality and submits to it, etc. Sontag perceives
the basic fact clearly: ". . . a photograph
not only an image (as a painting is an image),
an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace,
something directly stenciled off the real, like a
footprint or a death mask. While a painting,
even one that meets photographic standards of
resemblance, is never more than the stating of
an interpretation, a photograph is never less
than the registering of an emanation (light
waves reflected by objects) - a material vestige
of its subject in a way that no painting can
be." But she offers this decisive fact as one
symptom among dozens of others.
Being a superb watcher rather than a theor-
ist, Sontag also tends to view the short-term
fluctuations of taste as the tidal waves of his-
tory. One has to switch from long shot to close-
up to follow her when she reports that Walker
Evans wanted his photographs to be "literate,
authoritative, transcendent," and comments:
"The moral universe of the 1930s being no
longer ours, these adjectives are barely credible
today. Nobody demands that photography be
literate . . . ," and so on. Watching from some
distance, one wonders.
There is a disorienting ambiguity in using X
narrow diagnosis of today's mentality as the
base for a book "on photography." The present
validity of the medium is seen as that of a
"prototypically modern revelation: a negative
epiphany." It is not an accident that the one
photographer thoroughly analyzed in Sontag's
book is Diane Arbus. With a merciless inde-
pendence of judgment she reveals the lack of
pity, the absence of an ethical attitude in Ar-
bus's horror show of freaks. As though unaware
of their physical and mental deformation,
Arbus's models are shown to face the camera
with the poise of the average citizen, thereby
suggesting the nightmarish truth that they are
not exceptions but portraits of man of today.
The ugliness of the spirit has found its cor-
responding ugliness of appearance.
This "present historical mood of disenchant-
ment," of abandoned hope, and the "mournful
vision of loss," set the tone for Sontag's picture
of photography. Like a look at the world
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515
through the eyes of Time Magazine it is de-
pressing, not simply because the picture looks
so dark but because a onesided taste for im-
perfection distorts the interpretation as a whole
as well as the very flaws on which it focuses.
One thinks of the black cloth that covered the
early photographers' heads when they looked
at their subject.
Although saddening in many of its state-
is ments, Sontag's book exhilarates by its intel-
lectual sparkle. Only rarely is it concerned
with the formal qualities of images - it has no
illustrations and needs none. As a vivisection
of the current scene sub specie of a modern
medium it has no equal.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
University of Michigan
DAVIS, DOUGLASAND ALLISONSIMMONS,eds. The
New Television: A Public/Private Art. The
MIT Press, 1977, 289 pp., $14.95.
It should be possible to learn something inter-
esting about the concept, or concepts, of art
from studying the emergence and early devel-
opment of a new art: not only what is done by
those who strive for a vision of what it might
become, but also what is said by those who try
to articulate, even if prematurely, its promises
and problems. There may be an instructive
period when it struggles to free itself from
another art under whose wing it first appears,
to find its identity and special nature. There
will be a need for new concepts and terms to
describe that nature and to compare the various
early works as they are created. We may expect
new criteria of judgment to be offered, tenta-
tively and cautiously, as those most deeply
engaged in the art try - without wishing to
narrow the range of experimental works - to
decide which directions of development are
best to pursue and to encourage.
The dynamic forces released and made manip-
ulable by television seem destined to be the
matter of a new art: so many emotions, actual
and fictive, intensely concentrated in a small,
affectively saturated space, so piercingly precise
a perception of human action and condition,
down to the smallest wrinkles and restless finger
movements, so complete a presence -- the utter
nearness of something happening right here
and now - all combine to give an elsewhere
unmatchable sense of amazing but overwhelm-
ing revelation of truth, whether about walking
in space, dying in the street, finding relief for