Volume 5 Number 2

painting, which plays with color and form. It appears that criticism has learned very little in a century. Although we can accept, understand, and excuse the mother who disgustedly remarks that she has a 6-year-old daughter who can paint better than "that," it is depressing to find an intelligent, educated critic asking "what an abstract photograph is of" and arguing that "in photography the subject matter always pushes through." Again, she simply seems to have no idea of what is going on in the field. Perhaps the fact that she is unaware of how much she is unaware of is what enabled her to write the book; certainly a similar ignorance is what allowed the Times and Post critics to gush praise. The problem is highlighted in such passages as: Like language, photography is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made ... . Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, from the beginning photography has also lent itself to the notion of art which says that art is obsolete. We must assume "photography" is something unknown, that "painting" means fine-art painting rather than, for example, house painting or car painting. We must assume there is some logical comparison intended in the lack of symmetry in the comparison of forms: photography is like language; language is not like poetry. Photography is not like poetry any more than vegetables are not like oranges. Sontag has a vague set of layman's perceptions backed up by an intellectual's vocabulary. And nonsense, no matter how disguised by verbiage, is still nonsense. On Photography seems to ignore most scientific work and all amateur work, and draws little or no distinction between good and bad work. Again, it is as if photography is a monolith, instantly recognizable to all but those inside it. She notes: "In photography's early decades, photographs were expected to be idealized images. This is still the aim of most amateur photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph of something beautiful, like a woman, a sunset." Yet she blatantly states that " ... the line between amateur and professional, primitive and sophisticated is not just harder to draw with photography than it is with painting-it has little meaning. Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken by anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as representative of photography's characteristic powers as a Stieglitz or an Evans." For those of us who teach photography in our disciplines and have to work with unsophisticated students who believe this, encountering this same logic in a critic is irritating. Not only is Sontag overawed in her evaluation of painting, but she underestimates photography to an incredible degree. She needs to go into Woolworth's and buy a genuine original oil painting with wooden frame for $29.95, and she needs to go into the field and shoot 5000 shots in order to get the 50 that will eventually be published. It is even more depressing to read in The New York Times review that "the decisions a photographer must make, compared to those of the flower arranger or salad chef, are few and simple indeed. REVIEWS AND DISCUSSION 141 The effects of his actions are dominated by accident: the ambiance of an instant in the camera's apprehension of the world." Sontag notes: "Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art." Further, "Photographs don't seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist .... The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film 'The Cameraman,' which has an inept, dreamy Buster Keaton ... getting some great footage ... by inadvertence. It is the hero's pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time." This sounds cute, but she ignores the discrimination between what is common or average and what is good (which she later claims is impossible). The monkey analogy does not mention J. Fred Muggs displaying his modern art in museums. His work is gone, but Pollack remains. The same is true with photography. The ability to buy hundreds of tintypes, any one of which is over 100 years old, for less than $1.00 apiece scarcely suggests that they have been elevated to art. Sontag also slights the uses and functions of photography in the sciences, including the social sciences. She observes: "Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph," and "In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand." We can not go into the details of what distinguishes understanding gained from photographs from understanding gained from written forms, since in one sense understanding is an internal process, never residing in an external object. However, to argue that a single photograph is not a narrative or that we can not understand from photographs is to ignore, for the most specific example, the bubble chamber in subatomic physics. It is only through the photographs of the tracks of subatomic particles that we can discover them, analyze them, or understand them. The track left is the movement of the particle over time, and as such is as much of a narrative as the words which are then written about the particle. And even this does not open a discussion of the use of photography to record and to come to understand cultures, times, and places which are no longer present, or to understand the complexities of cultures-complexities those cultures may not even be aware of because they are strictly visual or because they are so inherently unstatable that they can be understood only when abstracted into the visual format. The problem is not that we simply offer intellectual disagreement on these areas or that our professional pride is hurt. Rather, our colleagues, and those who have responsibility over our work in terms of financial rewards, financial support, and academic survival, may read this and believe it. We are always "aware" of the simplicity of other areas. Who can distinguish the second-rank Baroque composers from one another, the second-rank medieval or Renaissance painters from one another, or the multitude of second-rank photographers, anthropologists, or sociologists from one another? The specialist in each area has that capacity, but for others, amateurs in the strictest sense, such real discriminatory ability is beyond their capacity, so all seem the same. In photography most of us can, most of the time, distinguish an Adams from an Atget from a Cartier Bresson. Some can tell a Winograd from a Davidson from an Evans from a White. The inability on Sontag's part, and the resultant belief that it cannot be done, is not a comment on photography. THE SOCIAL ACT OF PHOTOGRAPHY Throughout Sontag's book other problems quite common even to those working within the field arise: a confusion between "real" and "image" and ignorance of the complex questions concerning the social relationship of photographer to photographed and the meaning of that relationship. The existence of a photograph is a statement of someone's perception of the world; that makes it as real as that world itself, and at the same time as false. To argue that one is or is not as real, or is or is not primary or causal, is to misunderstand the creation of reality. We define our lives on the sliding, relative scale of time and space. Neither time nor space nor the "reality" of the life is absolute, and objects and events are created products. In learning how to weave this fabric of our lives, we rely on those meanings and principles of organization which are regularly provided in our culture, and this process of creation then feeds back into the culture to affect those meanings and principles. Sontag observes, for example: "Life is not about significant details, illuminated in a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are." She is fundamentally wrong in both senses. Our memory does consist of the significant details, but they are not necessarily set in a flash (although if we accept some of the premises of various psychological theories this may be true); neither are they fixed, but alter as required in the course of our lives. Further, pictures are not fixed forever. The patterns of silver grains are relatively permanent, but the meaning attached to them alters over time, which is to say that the act of looking at a picture is also a social act, and what we see changes as we change and our society changes. What a photograph means is not captured in the silver grains; it is created anew each time the image is viewed by social creatures, and the meaning and thus the object itself are no less, or no more, real than any other symbolic object.