Recently I started rereading Susan Sontag’s book of essays Regarding the Pain of Others to the accompaniment of shrieking feral cats, lightning striking tower cranes and biblical downpours (it’s rainy season here). This coincided with the Miami ‘zombie’ attack in which a man’s face was eaten off by a deranged assailant, an event which was used by the media as the cue for one of their semi-regular anti-drugs moral panics and emerged online as a throwaway, trivialised but virulent internet meme (‘Is this the start of the zombie apocalypse?’ etc). A few questions sprung to mind (besides the obvious ‘what would possess a man to find another living human being’s face palatable?’), mostly about the collective reaction. Has the internet as a medium changed us and made us less compassionate and more willing to fictionalise terrible events? Or have we always been creatures enthused by schadenfreude and a need to find gallows humour in the most catastrophic of circumstances? And, if so, what purpose do these serve? What would Sontag have made of it? Or Goya? Or any number of the figures she referenced in her work?
Regarding the Pain of Others led me back to Sontag’s masterpiece On Photography, a work that serves not just as a brilliant philosophical and sociological treatise, an enlightening history of photography but also, between the lines, a strangely prophetic work in terms of where society is heading and how images and their proliferation change us for better or worse. In the battered Penguin paperback edition that I’ve been reading there were no examples of the many photographs which Sontag referred to in the text, photographs that are freely available, though scattered, around the internet. So for my own benefit and hopefully that of others, I’ve put together links to as many of the images (and photographers) as I could find online with the corresponding page references and quotes from her work (copyright restrictions prevent me from posting them directly here). I hope you find it useful and if you haven’t read the book I strongly recommend it as one of those texts that changes the way you see things and not just in terms of photography. If you come across any broken links, kindly let me know via darrananderson1(at)gmail(dot)com
In Plato’s Cave
Page 3
‘In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe.’
p5
‘Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs…’
‘Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states…’
p6
‘Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs… still want, first of all, to show something “out there“…’
‘The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s…’
p 7
‘Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images…’
p 11
‘the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph.’
p 12
‘Dziga Vertov’s great film, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), gives the ideal image of the photographer as someone in perpetual movement…’
‘Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) gives the complementary image: the photographer plyed by James Stewart has an intensified relation to one event, through his camera, precisely because he has a broken leg and is confined to a wheelchair…’
p 13
‘In Blowup (1966), Antonioni has the fashion photographer hovering convulsively over Verushka’s body with his camera clicking.’
‘Michael Powell’s extraordinary movie Peeping Tom (1960)… about a psychopath who kills women with a weapon concealed in his camera, while photographing them.’
p 17
‘The photographs Mathew Brady and his colleagues took of the horrors of the battlefields did not make people any less keen to go on with the Civil War. The photographs of ill-clad, skeletal prisoners held at Andersonville inflamed Northern public opinion – against the South.”
‘Looking at the photographs… Lange took of Nisei… being transported to internment camps… to recognize their subject for what it was— a crime committed by the government against a large group of American citizens.’
p 18
‘a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm’
‘Felix Greene and Marc Riboud brought back photographs of Hanoi.’
p 19
‘Don McCullin‘s photographs of emaciated Biafrans’
‘Werner Bischof‘s photographs of Indian famine victims’
‘photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau‘
p 23
Jacob Riis‘s images of New York squalor in the 1880s’
‘As Brecht points out, a photograph of the Krupp works reveals virtually nothing about that organization’
America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly
p 27
‘The Great American Cultural Revolution heralded in the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) didn’t break out’
p 28
‘In 1915 Edward Steichen photographed a milk bottle on a tenement fire escape’
p 29
‘Walker Evans – ‘the last great photographer to work seriously and assuredly in a mood deriving from Whitman’s euphoric humanism’
‘the images reproduced and consecrated in the sumptuous magazine Camera Work‘
‘Lewis Hine‘s stunning photographs of immigrants and workers’
p 30
‘the prescient series of ‘secret’ photographs of anonymous New York subway riders that Evans took with a concealed camera’
p 31
‘The last sigh of the Whitmanesque erotic embrace of the nation, but universalized and stripped of all demands, was heard in the ‘Family of Man’ exhibit’
p 32
‘Arbus‘s work does not invite viewers to identify with the pariahs and miserable-looking people she photographed. Humanity is not “one”.’
p 34
‘the babies look disturbed, crazy…’
p 35
‘It may be two girls wearing identical raincoats whom Arbus photographed together in Central Park…’
‘a boy waiting to march in a pro-war parade, wearing his straw boater and his “Bomb Hanoi” button…’
‘the King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance…’
‘a thirtyish suburban couple sprawled in their lawn chairs’
‘a widow sitting alone in her cluttered bedroom.’
‘A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY’
p 36
‘The female impersonators in their dressing rooms’
‘the Mexican dwarf in his Manhattan hotel room’
‘the Russian midgets in a living room on 100th Street’
‘the quarreling elderly couple on a park bench’
‘the New Orleans lady bartender at home with a souvenir dog’
‘the boy in Central Park clenching his toy hand grenade’
‘Brassaï denounced photographers who try to trap their subjects off-guard’
p 37
‘Compare the 1912 photograph by Lartigue of a woman in a plumed hat and veil with Arbus’s ‘Woman with a Veil on Fifth Avenue, NYC, 1968’
p 38
‘Perhaps the scariest scene in Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932) is the wedding banquet…’
p 43
‘What in the 1930s was treated with anguish – as in Miss Lonely-hearts and The Day of the Locust would in the 1960s be treated in a perfectly deadpan way, or with positive relish…’
‘the thriving Freak Show at Coney Island was outlawed…’
p 44
‘Most of Arbus’s work lies within the Warhol aesthetic’
p 45
‘much of Arbus’s material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls‘
p 46
‘Weegee‘s photographs are indeed upsetting’
‘Brassaï, who photographed people like those who interested Arbus – see his La Môme Bijou‘
‘Lewis Hine’s “Mental Institution, New Jersey, 1924” could be a late Arbus photograph’
‘Giorgio Morandi, who spent a half century doing still lifes of bottles’
Melancholy Objects
p 51
‘century-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility’
‘its liberation rhetoric helped to nudge Jackson Pollack and others into a new kind of irreverent abstraction’
p 52
‘the solarized photographs and Rayographs of Man Ray‘
‘the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy‘
‘the multiple-exposure studies of Bragaglia‘
‘the photomontages of John Heartfield and Alexander Rodchenko‘
p 53
‘The sales pitch for the first Kodak , in 1888, was: “You press the button, we do the rest.”‘
‘an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus’
p 54
‘the earliest surreal photographs come from the 1850s’
p 55
‘photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flaneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire‘
‘the candid snapshots taken in the 1890s by Paul Martin in London streets’
‘by Arnold Genthe in San Francisco’s Chinatown’
‘Atget‘s twilight Paris of shabby streets and decaying trades’
‘the dramas of sex and loneliness depicted in Brassaï’s book Paris by Nuit‘
‘the city as a theatre of disaster in Weegee’s Naked City (1945)’
p 56
‘How the Other Half Lives to cite the innocently explicit title that Jacob Riis gave to the book of photographs of the New York poor that he brought out in 1890′
‘Bruce Davidson‘s book of Harlem photographs’
p 57
‘For a wellborn photographer of the late nineteenth century like the bookish Count Giuseppe Primoli, the street life of the underprivileged was at least as interesting as the pastimes of his fellow aristocrats…’
‘the earliest model of the sustained look downward are the thirty-six photographs in Street Life in London (1877-78) taken by the British traveler and photographer John Thomson.’
‘Before turning to the poor of his own country, he had already been to see the heathen, a sojourn which resulted in his four-volume Illustrations of China and Its People (1873-74).
p 58
‘the thing Lewis Carroll had for little girls’
‘the photographs he [Cecil Beaton] took of Edith Sitwell’
p 59
‘an example of photography-as-science is the project August Sander began in 1911…’
‘Georg Grosz‘s drawings… summed up the spirit and variety of types in Weimar Germany through caricature’
‘Compare his [Sander’s] 1930 photograph “Circus People”
‘Arbus’s studies of circus people‘
‘the portraits of demimonde characters by Lisette Model‘
p 60
‘Like Eadweard Muybridge, whose photographic studies in the 1880s managed to dispel misconceptions about what everybody had always seen…’
‘Sander, who stayed in Germany throughout the Nazi period, switched to landscape photography‘
p 61
Robert Frank’s The Americans
p 62
‘Adam Clark Vroman… photographed Indians in Arizona and New Mexico between 1895 and 1904′
p 67
‘Clarence John Laughlin, a self-avowed exponent of “extreme romanticism”
‘a Laughlin photograph from 1962, “Spectre of Coca-Cola”
Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York
p 68
Kurt Schwitters
p 69
‘architects like Robert Venturi learn from Las Vegas…’
‘Reyner Banham lauds Los Angeles’s “instant architecture and instant townscape” for its gift of freedom, of a good life impossible amid the beauties and squalors of the European city’
‘At the very beginning of photography, the late 1830s, William H. Fox Talbot noted the camera’s special aptitude for recording “the injuries of time”.’
p 70
‘One’s reaction to the photographs Roman Vishniac took in 1938 of daily life in the ghettos of Poland are overwhelmingly affected by the knowledge of how soon all these people were to perish.’
‘Some working-class Berliners in Robert Siodmak’s film Menschen am Sonntag (1929) are having their pictures taken at the end of a Sunday outing.’
‘And one of the most disquieting films ever made, Chris Marker’s …