Sontag and Azoulay

 The excerpts of Susan Sontag in Regarding The Pain of Others and Ariella Azoulay in The Civil Contract of Photography both take on drastically different views that what we have just read about in regard to Fried and his views on photography. Briefly, both of these women are more focused on what Fried would call the "theatrical" quality of the images, or what the viewer is supposed to take away from the photographs. To both Sontag and Azoulay, these responses are part of what make the photographs real which shows a harsh contrast to Fried's desire for anti-theatrical, aesthetic images.

Susan Sontag had previously written a series of essays entitled On Photography which she wrote in 1977 and came forward with the issue of photography showing traumatic events and gruesome happenings. Sontag believed then that photographs such as these, that we see constantly streaming through the news, ultimately numb us to their horrors and we are unable to look at them with the same emotions and disbelief as we originally had. However, 25 years later, she publishes a book entitled Regarding The Pain of Others where she basically discredits her previous views. In the excerpt that we read, Sontag revisits how we see photographs and why we have the reactions we do.

Though she says we cannot group the entirety of humankind based on one social group, she does find that there is a problem with the way those in "cushy" lifestyles view news photographs. Here she says that these people live in a "society of spectacle [where] each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real (interesting) to us." The example she uses are celebrities, and how they work for an image (not reality) and that the media then represents these images as reality. Basically, Sontag tries to show us how skewed our perceptions of reality are...at least for those of us who are not worried about our houses being blown up everyday and shell casings landing in our front yards.  Now that more people have more access than ever to images that show traumatic events, it may seem that this super saturation of images would (like she previously wrote) callous us to their impact. However, to this point, Sontag says now that it's not that people are responding less, but that they just don't like the feelings that are brought up when viewing the images, and choose to look away or change the channel, or put down the paper/magazine. They choose to view the created realities of where Britney Spears went shopping yesterday and what she bought at the grocery store and what her children are wearing and if she put on makeup or not. Images like this don't make people feel uncomfortable. They don't invoke thought or response; they allow people to see this as "reality" and accept it, and move on with their day.

I believe, as does Sontag, that viewing images that show actual reality (events that I don't even have the ability to fully understand or conceptualize) are so important for everybody, especially the comfortable, cushy social classes, to view and experience. Images like this show us what human beings are capable of. They show us what we may not want to see, but what we must see. They are not there to make us feel more or to take on the suffering (although the victims will sometimes want this), they are to inform us, to make us question, to make us think, to make is realize, to make us respond (very much what Fried would consider theatricality). Once we realize the full scope of what human beings are capable of doing, we will have reached what Sontag refers to as full moral and psychological adulthood. At this point, we can no longer claim naiveness, or innocence. We are aware, and even if we choose to turn off our televisions, we still know.

One quote that caught my attention in Sontag's writing, was where she said "If we could do something about what the images show, we might not care as much about these issues." My first reaction was to wholeheartedly disagree, because I felt that by being able to help, we'd invest part of our conscience into helping and in doing so, become even more attached to the issue at hand. However, when I stopped to think about it, I realized that if they were problems that we could simply view, help, and be done with, they would be out of our mind as a situation that was once not okay, but now it's okay and we don't have to think about it anymore. It was a simple bump in life and now everything is good. Because these horrendous issues are 9 times out of 10 things that we cannot do anything about, we must then live knowing that these atrocities will continue as we eat our warm meals at night, take our hot showers, and climb under our soft, down comforters, able to sleep soundly without machine guns ringing outside our doorsteps. With these issues always at hand, we are not calloused by them, but even more so affected by their presence and semi-conscious nagging throughout the day. These are things that we cannot do anything about, and that we don't understand; things that we don't get; things that we will never know. These horrors that come to us through photographs are not part of our experience, but they do stick with us in memories. They are what is real.

One problem that Sontag brought up in dealing with the viewing of the images, is just that: how and where they are viewed. In an art gallery, where it is the norm for photographs to be shown, there is an air of a social event. People come with their families, look at the photographs, then go out to lunch and a movie, and maybe some ice cream. Sure, maybe they were struck by some of the images, maybe they were upset by some of them, maybe they questioned the events a little bit, but it was not an individual, reflective experience. They came with their children. It was an afternoon activity. They didn't sit down in front of each photograph and really let themselves get lost in the questions that it may arise. These photographs were hung in a gallery. They are art. And they will be viewed as art. Sontag offers that magazines and books may be more proper ways to view photographs, as one can sit in the privacy of their own home and spend as much time as they'd like looking at each photograph. However, there are a few problems which you would run into here:

1. There are advertisements in most every magazine, and these advertisements are sometimes using a photograph and paired up right next to one of the traumatic photographs, so as we're looking at dying children suffering from malnutrition in Africa, we also are seeing how beautiful and soft Jergens can make our skin. The photograph sort of loses its impact.
2. One always ends up closing the book/magazine. No matter how long they spend looking at the images, the book gets closed up and put away. That's not to say that the impact of viewing the events isn't still with us, but it will fade as we go back to our daily routine in which we do not experience anything even mildly close to what the people in the photographs are going through simultaneously.
3. By viewing the images, we are simply just viewing them. We are not really experiencing the events. We cannot understand what is truly going on. However, the point is also made that even if we were in the war zone, we would still be just a spectator, viewing bombs go off in front of us and people dying beside us. Though it would have greater of an impact upon us, we are always just viewing unless we are directly involved in the conflict, and at that point, photographs of the event in which we are involved become arbitrary because they cannot show fully the extent of what has been experienced.

There will always be these slight discrepancies. Regardless, Ariella Azoulay believes that we can still draw plenty of understanding from these photographs.

Azoulay does mention Sontag a few times in this excerpt, and starts out by referencing Sontag's On Photography, saying that photographs cannot become exhaustive because there will always be somewhat of a mystery between the subject and the photographer (I will go into more detail about this in a minute). Azoulay begins by telling us about her childhood and how she experienced a bombing when she was young, and how a lot of the images she has in her head are not from actual photographs, but from events which she experienced and then created these mental images, or from things that her mother would say (usually regarding Arabs), which she would create images for in her mind. She believes that there are two types of these mental images:

1. The mental image was ingrained because of an obvious traumatic event.
2. The mental image was ingrained without the person even realizing it at the time, but will later be discovered in some corner of the mind, complete with its trauma and impact.

In these ways, memories (or mental images) are the strongest form of imagery. In looking at a photograph, one is forced to see exactly what the photographer framed, and the vantage point at which they framed it. One is forced to watch (I will also explain watch vs. see further on) this person at this specific moment the photograph was snapped, and all of these factors may bias the photograph and cause it to be seen one way or another. However, with mental imagery, the images were impacted without a third party in between the event and the viewer (the one whose mind the images are impacted in). There is no dictation of framing or vantage point or lighting, etc. There is the event how it happened and that is that.

Briefly, Azoulay touches on advertisement in slight contrast to Sontag. Where Sontag says that advertisements show a comparison of both the image of the advertisement and the images showing reality, Azoulay says that there is not even a comparison. That the advertisement photograph is nothing but a picture. It does not invite the viewer to think about it or study it. It is not even close to the same "medium" as an actual photograph. Azoulay's view of photographs is that one needs to view the image and understand what it is, to question its details and to become immersed in its mystery. She sees no point in looking at a photograph's aesthetic. In this point, I am almost tempted to agree, which came as quite a surprise for me. Previously, I had the idea that if you were to take two photographs of the same object/person, one photograph being aesthetically pleasing and the other more of the snapshot variety, that I would lose complete interest in the non aesthetic image because there would be small missing pieces of the aesthetic qualities that have been pushed on me for 2 years now going to school as a photographer. I felt that maybe the inattention to cropping and framing would keep catching my eye more so than the actual subject matter of the image. Azoulay has called on me to rethink this. Although I still think that photographs need to be taken with some sort of knowledge of what is aesthetically pleasing, I feel that now I will look at photographs more in the realm of "what is actually going on in this image" versus how good of a photographer the person was who took the image. This changed way of viewing photographs will obviously be determinate on the subject matter of the image. If it is an image of flowers or food or some unimportant moment in time, like a fountain going off, I will still be looking for the aesthetics first because I know that in taking photographs like this, the aesthetic is really all there is. If the image is of some sort of important event or a portrait or something not so flat (like flowers), I will probably now look at it with different eyes. And these eyes, Azoulay believes, need to look at these photographs (she talks of photographs of people only from this point on) and not just see the people in them, but watch these people.

One should not see these photographs as documentation of the person having been there, but watching them as they are still standing there. In seeing the photographs in the latter way, there is less of a chance of immoral views. We cannot then break down the photograph as a historical documentation, but as a real time happening, and therefore must apply our immediate morals to the image because it is, in a way, happening right now.

Azoulay calls on the viewer to look at the issues in the photographs through the looks, gazes, and actions of those in the photographs, and to see the subjects as people, as human beings, not as a designated "enemy" or race, class, gender, or religion. She states that we are all citizens of the world of photography, and deems this "The Civil Contract of Photography." The Civil Contract of Photography is meant to break nations' boundaries which threaten to break apart the citizens, and to place all the aspects of photography and the creation of the photograph (the camera, the photographer, the subject, and the viewer) into a neutrally "governed" area: photography. When viewing a photograph, we become part of this community. It is common knowledge that nothing here is written in stone, and that we all know what to expect and what we need to do in viewing the photographs. It is not a place of prejudices and separating subjects into what is right and wrong, good and bad, but to view them as people and to try to better understand their situations. We need to approach the photograph and its meaning as an unintentional effect of the encounter between the camera, photographer, subject, and viewer. In doing so, one will be able to continuously break apart a photograph, finding new things that add meaning and depth to the image and the humanity of the person in the image (this goes back to how Azoulay said there is no way a photograph can become exhaustive because there is always more to discover).

Focusing greatly on the actual subject of the images, Azoulay sets up a discussion of the intentions of the photographed. The subject has agreed to be photographed as they were, and in doing so, they are sending a message to all viewers about their situation. This brings up a slur of questions. Is the subject looking through the photograph to me? Is the subject looking through the photograph to anybody willing to view it? Is the subject aware that anybody will even see this photograph? Does the subject want me to understand their situation, or just experience it through the watching of the photograph? Is the subject calling on me/the viewer to respond and take action? Though the answers may never be quite clear, there are some images that are more straightforward. Azoulay describes the image of the rioter holding the broken lock of his store after paratroopers broke in to stop the protesting (Photo 1). He has chosen to be photographed. He is "posing" for the photograph in holding out the broken lock. In his choosing to be photographed, he has taken control of the situation. He is voicing his situation and not just accepting defeat of what happened. The immediacy of this man's gaze is calling on the viewer to take action and to respond, which contrasts Sontag's idea that we cannot do anything to help this situation. However, maybe it is not that we are called on to help, but that we are called on to understand that this has happened, that this is happening, and that this will happen again. In The Civil Contract of Photography, its citizens call forth the viewers to see them as they are and to gain some understanding of what they are going through. These photographic citizens are governed only by the viewer and the photographic community (not their native government), and they do not bring with them status, ownership, practices, or their institutions. They come as equals and call out to be seen as the individuals that they are.

Photo 1 - Anat Saragusti, Hebron 1982