“On Photography”: Feminist Ideas in the Photograph of Susan Sontag | Literature

The Arcadia editorial published several North American publications of her works, “On Business” and “On Photography.” Only complete understanding of your thoughts.

Susan Sontag, feminist activist

“He is always a feminist,” Susan Sontag answered in 1972 to one of the questions posed by the editors of the magazine liverya leaflet was sent in Castilla to women’s rights activists, who also included Simone de Beauvoir. This phrase from Sontag is so relevant that it erases many doubts about the feminist affiliation of North American theory, some doubts in the basic sense but encourages some doubts about Sontag’s enrollment in radical feminism.

I am sure that Sontag will always criticize the political discourse of the feminist movement, as reductionist and accused of over-moralizing: “He who also condemned the bourgeoisie, and suppressed elitism, would also expose falsehood. It serves feminist goals in the short term, but it assumes surrender to some puerile notions of art and thought and agitation for morality that has already been suppressed.”

Feminist (critical) consciousness is in its theoretical, political and aesthetic interest in feminism, which has been widely shaped over the past decade: “My own experience is just a certain political perspective. The good fortune that I can see is irrelevant here,” he states in this question, when he criticizes the feminism that waters down “other realities.”

About Les Dunes Collecting texts and interviews published between 1972 and 1975, it re-presents part of Seven Meditations by Notes on campText published in 1964. Yes camp To oppose the role imposed on the landlord by “powerful, sharp, vulgar parodies,” the political power of noun feminism lies in the deconstruction of the concepts it embodies – beauty, youth, marriage, family… – but also in the radical questioning of the concept of gender: “A society in which those who follow in a subjective and objective way are on an equal footing with men,” says Sontag, “must by force be a society of androgyny.”

For Sontag, it is necessary to ridicule and question genres, because it is the way to depolarize the tone of the home/landlord, which is necessary to balance the demands associated with the gender role. I seek freedom from production on family land and work, but also from the costs, in the combat camps. This is a question of freedom of decision – of reductionism – in the past, of violating themes of beauty and youthful impositions: “They must have an alternative. To be ambitious for them and not just in relation to both homes and children. The truth of the veracity of Sontag’s feminist texts can only be called into question by her sharpest gaze, the most accommodating criticism. Ana Maria Iglesia

Armed look

Between 1973 and 1977, there New York Review of Books I will be publishing six short essays by Susan Sontag covering different aspects of photography. While in the past we have prepared systematic study, these clear pieces and visions do not critically explore the natural world and its impact on ethical, political, aesthetic and cultural perspectives. I felt at a moment when images were beginning to satiate money and would relentlessly serve the purposes of the new consumer culture. In 1977, these texts will be collected About photographyone of the New York Killer’s most famous contributions. The work, which has helped model the way we understand the relationships between photographers, photographic objects and spectators, is more important than ever as the photograph subordinates reality by imposing its own reality.

Sontag suggests that images provide rules and ethics of seeing. The grammarian, to organize the presentation, proposes a visual vocabulary that shapes perception. Morally, because each image expresses a certain situation, it conveys a way of looking at things, and influences that person’s perception. The act of photography traverses an intense tension between observation and implication: the camera in reality, which turns tourists of reality into customers. The photographic act is an act of non-intervention: between photographic captures, it accepts the reality of whatever it is logical to modify. This voyeuristic act reveals human doubt. A critical awareness of photography can distance us emotionally and morally from whatever they depict.

And by the way, the idea that photography does not represent reality or reproduce it, but rather creates (the camera compared to a weapon satisfies a relationship of possession both in the world). Images have been created that decontextualize what is familial through the isolated terrain, and help add each mysterious character. Here you are with photography, that is, whatever comes, turning it into something aesthetic and cultural: “The collective collection of photographs is an exercise in surrealist production,” says the author. Sontag would have been a pioneer in eliminating the intrinsic manipulative potential of images and social control.

Another central topic of analysis: photography with anesthesia. Photography makes horror banal, and it makes the grotesque commonplace. Our promise to be freer (in consciousness, thought, and information), meanwhile, ends up numbing moral sensitivity. On the other hand, we also invite emotion: photographs turn the past into an object of emotional contemplation. It also feeds the vanity of beliefs that one can understand the world exclusively through constant visual reproduction. The author’s ideal suggestion: reduce the consumption of images to avoid being arrested in Plato’s tomb.

Sontag uses a variety of references to analyze the aesthetic and ideological transformation of photography in Units of Statistics. I highlight the failure of photographs to raise social awareness. “Photographic vision” is always embellished, estetitza: “The unpleasantly stated intention of a photograph (…) will reveal the truth in beauty, the photograph equally embellished. (…) ending in these cases, the real is pity. I ask pity You are beautiful.”

The photographs do not form a clear unity of each other. In capitalist society, only entertainment, propaganda and surveillance: political freedom turns into consumer freedom, which requires an end to the consumption of images. “All that he proves anew, Susan Sontag’s veil of photography was so powerful, because it discovered the essence of a visual culture that was moving beyond photography: the contradiction between documenting and constructing the world, the symbolic appropriation of reality, the excess of images and photography.” “Seva capacitat anesthetic, the power of the gaze when I have a camera in hand… There is a lot of insight to update this analysis in the age of artificial intelligence,” explains Joan Fontcuberta. per Cesca Castelfi