Some Thoughts On My Photograph Albums, Thanks to Susan Sontag for some of these thoughts... |
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 Nov 19 2009, 11:43 PM
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New Member  Group: Members Posts: 7 Joined: 10-August 09 From: George Town Tasmania Member No.: 19,645  |
In my approximately 30 volumes of letters and emails, readers will find yet more visual material which I have not mentioned elsewhere. If readers dig enough, if such be their desire for whatever reason, due to some particular family interest that develops, for example, after my death; due to some group’s interest in an aspect of arts and letters or history and biography; or due to some altered circumstances associated with the rapid evolution of the Faith I have been associated with for over half a century, they will find more of the visual. I conclude the introductory section of this binder Volume 1.3.1 with the following ideas which, when I first came upon them in the world of Susan Sontag's writings, I found intellectually stimulating. And so, I pass them on to readers who may, perchance, find them equally so.
Our contemporary culture of digitization and image-glut may actually shrivel the ethical force of photographs of atrocity, violence and trauma, so argues this leading commentator on American culture in my time. Sontag argues that there is “a suspicion of Anything that seems literary.” Whether in an age in which spectacle has usurped the place of reality, photographic images still have the power to evoke shock and sentiment is a complex question, too complex to deal with here. Nor is it my intention to provide even a short summary of Sontag’s ideas here. Photographs are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar of a consistently unfolding tale. I'm not sure that this matters much; indeed, it is difficult to know exactly what does matter in life. We each must choose our agenda of what matters. The photographic frame is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself interpreting, actively, even forcibly. Sontag most famously writes that where "narratives make us understand: photographs do something else. They haunt us." In an age in which she herself says "to remember is more and more not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture." Given the sheer sweep of the visual image in contemporary culture and politics, I struggle to come to terms with the nature of memorialization in all its forms, that is the memorialization effected by photographs. I ponder as to what is the kind of affect relayed by photographic images as discrete and punctual fragments of reality. Beauty can reside, says Sontag, in any photo, however banal, however random; photography conflates the notion of the beautiful and the interesting. Photography aestheticizes the whole world; perhaps this is true, a fortiori, of other print and electronic media. The culture of 'image-glut' is a harried and, in fact, beleaguered document that swims across the surface of our world and is often little more than a frustrated rant against the inhuman multiplication not just of images, but of the sacrilegious settings in which we see them. The place of the image in an era of information-overload and the capacity of the image in such a landscape to infinitely and perhaps irrationally multiply its significations is indeed a complex one. These words, these ideas I have put on paper here in the introduction to this photo album, are simply suggestive of a world of analysis of photographs, a world I explore to some extent in other places. To photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude. So wrote Manisha Basu in his Review of Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, NY, 2003 in Postmodern Culture, 2006. Much is excluded here in this album; indeed most of my life. But some of it has been captured for readers who might enjoy some of the delights herein; some of my life has been captured for others who would normally not have experienced what I experienced. For each of us has a unique experience even if we share much in common. Fragments of reality are elevated to privileged positions, Sontag says. I like that idea. It seems at least partly true. And there is poignancy here and a kind of pathos—and I trust not a little joy. Ron Price 27 May 2007 (draft # 3) -------------------- married for 42 years, a teacher for 35 and a Baha'i for50
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