The first essay in Susan Sontag’s book, On Photography, is titled “In Plato’s Cave.” I love Sontag’s writing. It does what all good writing should do: it provokes me. It doesn’t try to be my friend; it tries to make me think.
The trope of Plato’s cave—firelit shadows dancing on a wall—suggests the basic mechanisms of photography itself. Instead of firelight, photographers rely on sunlight or flashes; instead of shadows, they capture light reflected from their subjects; and instead of a wall, they cast that light on film or image sensors. Sontag invokes the trope the way clergy tell a parable: it has a didactic purpose. Like the dancing shadows, the reflected light we have captured on our image sensors is a dull likeness of a fuller reality that lies just beyond our apprehension.
But there’s something about Sontag’s tone that troubles me. She expresses her views in extreme terms:
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.
I’m troubled by her use of the word all. She lays this down as an absolute law of universal application. She leaves no room for variations in personal experience.
At the end of the essay, she offers another grand pronouncement of universal application:
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
First published in the New York Review of Books nearly 50 years ago, her words have taken on new life in the post Instagram age when people will produce 1.72 trillion photographs in 2022. How prescient! say her admirers. Well. Yes and no.
While I do agree that we are a society of image-junkies, our addiction goes beyond image-making. We are addicted to stimulation: binge-watching Netflix shows, road rage in GTA, Twitter hate-fests, Tik-Tok porn, live-streaming Ukraine gun battles. An image avalanche may well be the least part of our addiction.
What Sontag’s observations may miss 50 years after the fact is that, among the countless motivations for making images, many contemporary image-makers may use the process as a defence against over-stimulation. Like so many others, I answer Sontag’s invitation to turn around in Plato’s cave and stare at the world as it really is, only to find a world so saturated with stimuli that I find myself inundated.
My reality is a media-saturated reality. The only way I can cope with its overwhelm is to turn its tools on itself. I don’t make photographs to colonize the world, or to commodify it, or to fetishize it. I make photographs as a way to throw up a buffer between myself and a fuller reality. I tighten the frame and get rid of the colour to make the buffer more effective. Without that buffer, I would go crazy. I need Plato’s cave. I need the protection it gives me from a version of the real that isn’t interested in my well-being.
