Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image. 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And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which paradoxically atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile world in his or her head. Today we're discussing two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography in Plato's Cave and Seen Through Photographs Darkly, and asking what constitutes photography's ethics of seeing and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, just coincidentally, I've been printing out tons of photographs over the last few days of my sister at various stages of her life because I'm the maid of honor for her wedding and I'm throwing her bridal shower. So, you know, we had decided to cover these essays. And then just over the last couple days, I happened to be looking through old family photo albums anyway, so it's been a strange thing to read these essays in tandem with that. And I've been thinking about how attached I am. I wouldn't say that I take a lot of photos, but I love photos. I love photos of family. I have photos everywhere, and various apartments I've lived in have always been covered in photos. I just wonder what your relationship is. You don't strike me as someone who takes a lot of photos either. Do you have a lot of photo albums? Are there certain photos that you love looking at? Do you have attachments to photos? 2:10 Wes: I do have some photo albums and I used to curate those much more actively when I was in my 20s and maybe 30s, but because it's become much less common to actually, you know, there was a time when you had to take your disposable camera to the. To the pharmacy and have them do their magic. And you. 2:32 Erin: I'm going to the pharmacy after this to pick up. Oh, really? Yeah, because I'm making displays which are for the bridal shower, so I have to go pick up prints from CVS for the first time in years. Just later this afternoon. 2:48 Wes: Amazing. That's the. 2:49 Erin: The coincidences that. Bizarre. 2:51 Wes: Yeah. You know, and then you'd have to wait a couple weeks or whatever, and it was. But sad to say, I think the. What do you even call them? What's the thing? You keep your photos in the binder. Those are in storage. And I've digitized everything. I digitized everything. And I digitized a bunch of my mom's photos that she had kind of lying around because I wanted some of those. But she would always. She's always worried about me taking her photos. You know, like, it was always a thing with my mom and me. Like, she accused me of stealing her books, which I. Which I did, and taking the taking as a kid, you know, like taking her books out of her room and putting them in my room or out of the living room and just putting them on the shelves in my room. But anyway, yeah, now I have a digital collection, and I can't say that I spend a lot of time looking at that, except for pictures of my cat. Those are like the main pictures that I take if I go on a vacation. So recently I was in Tucson and went up to Mount Lemmon and did various things. So I'll take a few photos. How do I put this? I don't take a lot. I don't like the way it. It's, you know, for reasons that Sontag talks about, the way it interrupts the experience, or it feels like I'm trying to behave in an acquisitive way towards the experience or commodify it. And also, I don't know what the point is exactly. I mean, you see people taking so many photos. It's like, how would you ever have the time in your life to go back and look at all the photos that you're taking? No one's going to even have the time. It goes into the cloud, the cloud storage, and that's it. And it's reassuring to know that it exists there. So you have that you could go back to it, but she probably won't. 4:39 Erin: It occurred to me that a lot of what Sontag covers in the essays is just even more apparent now with the iPhone. And so a lot of this seems to me to be super relevant. But one of the phenomena that I've been talking about with a friend of mine in relation to this. Yeah, just these thousands and thousands of images that live on our phones or on our computers is, I think, this further, I don't know, democratization of experience that she's talking about, which is, you know, how you go into. Into iphotos and it'll show you. Well, first of all, everything is organized by date. There are maps, too. Like, you could look at the map of the world and see the photos that you've taken in different locations. But specifically this on this date function where it will show you what you were doing on the same day a year ago, five years ago, whatever. And Facebook does this too, right? With Facebook memories, which I was obsessed with for a while, probably around the time that it first rolled out or when I first noticed it, which might have been a long time afterwards. And it had this curious effect, specifically the days in which it would. There was nothing that you had posted on that day in all the years that you've had Facebook, if you, if you know it's today is March 2nd, if there was nothing that you ever did on March 2nd that you posted on Facebook about it would tell you you have no memories on this day, which I thought was, you know, chilling. And it would. It almost spurs you to want to. I mean, it doesn't for me, but it would spur you to want, know what you were doing on that day or to post something so that next year, on March 2, you would have something that, you know, some evidence that you existed on that day. But in, in relation to this, this democratization, it's as if all of these photo apps now want every day to be like an anniversary or a birthday. Every day becomes a significant day. So insofar as every experience a photograph, as Sontag says, becomes flattened. Everyone who's. Who's photographed is a celebrity and therefore everyone is a celebrity and therefore nobody's a celebrity. This tying it to a date so that you might be, you know, 50 years ago. You might be photographed every, every year on your birthday and every year at school picture day or something like that. And other than that, maybe you don't have. And graduation, maybe you don't have very many everyday photos of your life now. It's as though every day of the year is some kind of big event. And if you don't have a photograph from that specific date, there's this black hole in your photographic record. The attempt to capture everything in your life and therefore give meaning to every moment of your life. And obviously the flip side of that is taking away meaning in every moment of your life. That creep, it just seems to get more and more like, I wonder what the next step is beyond that. Once, once every day has become an anniversary, you know, is it going to show you what you were doing hour by hour, minute by minute, where you were what. When you go places, will it ping on your phone? Your past photographs from that particular street corner, Starbucks, hotel, me get pen, I 7:42 Wes: need to write these ideas down, because I can get AI to Vibe code this for me. 7:49 Erin: I don't know what the point of any of this is, just that, yeah, I was really interested in this idea of an imperializing democracy that Sontag pinpoints. And that's kind of the. Where I wanted to begin. But I'm going about it in a very weird way. 8:03 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. A kind of leveling that between experiences that becomes overpowering or subjects us. Is that the idea? 8:12 Erin: Yeah. She makes the point very subtly. She says on page seven, this is in Plato's cave. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning, to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. It's a bit of a stretch, but I just noted the proximity in the paragraph. I mean, they're a sentence apart from each other. Imperial and democratize. So the
