Nature of Photography Term Paper

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Sontag photograph in Plato's cave with Yves Klein leap into the void.

Susan Sontag's "In Plato Cave" as applied to Yves Klein's photograph, "Leap into the void"

According to Susan Sontag, photographs possess tremendous power. "Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe" (Sontag 3). To be a photographer is to be in a position of power over one's subject: the creation of a still life appropriates the object being photographed and turns it into something else. A good example of this might be an indigenous person photographed by a tourist. By him or herself, the indigenous person is simply 'real life' and equally human to someone in the developed world. By taking a photograph of the individual, however, the photographer renders the indigenous person into an object that is representative of local culture.

This is very dangerous because even though photographs are created by the vision and the perspective of the taker, they appear to be unfiltered depictions of 'real life.' There is a surface texture of reality and photographs, unlike works like art, seem like little pieces of reality, even though they are just as subjective as a painting.

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"In deciding how a picture should look, preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects" (Sontag 6). Sontag uses the example of the photos of displaced farmers during the 1930s as an example: although these pictures appeared to be quite naturalistic, they were, in fact, highly crafted and staged to say what the photographers wanted them to say. Photographs can also be distorted and tampered with so that what appears to be taken from life is a mirage, even though the photographic medium seems more truthful than art, drawing, or other forms of seemingly more subjective representation.

Sontag sees all photographs as potentially exploitative, regardless of whether they idealize the subject and show a positive….....

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