On Photography

“Photographic Evangels” furthers Sontag’s direct confrontation with leftist politics, which she established in “Heroism of Vision.” Sontag considers the view of photography that its proponents offer completely false. The question of whether photography is art is “an essentially misleading one” (116). Asserting that photography is a medium like language completely negates the ability for it to be inherently galvanizing or a useful tool. Sontag’s assertions are part of a long and complex history on the question of art’s use in revolution and galvanizing people to work toward a better future.

If photography is akin to language, then it isn’t an art form and thus has no inherent capacity to teach or instruct. Sontag’s underlying assumption is that some art forms inherently lean one way or another politically; for example, novelists often use dystopian fiction as a vehicle to satirize the shortcomings of modern-day status quo politics. Likewise, Sontag considers surrealism inherently reactionary and defensive of the status quo. If photography is like language, then it might be used for something forward-thinking like dystopian literature or something reactionary like surrealist literature. Sontag notes that language can make “scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac’s Paris,” arguing that language is inherently apolitical (116). Photography’s multipurpose use as a communicatory medium and the ability to endlessly recontextualize photographs robs photography of the revolutionary impulse that Sontag’s contemporaries thought they might find in the medium.

Sontag views museums as an institution that validates photography as an art form and gatekeeps prestige for photographers. Sontag’s logic is that if museums are the high judges of photography, then photography as an art form should be visible within them. Sontag finds museum curations of photography lacking: “These photographs have their power as images (or copies) of the world, not of an individual artist’s consciousness” (104). The loss of the individual auteur artist within a photography display weakens the role of the artist in all of art since all art now aspires to be photography. For Sontag, the touch of an individual artist is necessary to call something an art form.

The loss of individuals and their “soul” within their artwork allows art to become a contextual-less commodity to be consumed and replicated at will, emphasizing the theme of Art and Power Dynamics. Sontag turns to film, television, and video as by-products of photography that rely on this democratized art process: Films and television shows can’t be attributed to a single author while becoming some of the biggest commodities in industries in the world today. Artwork that can be attributed to a single author, such as paintings or a novel, are significantly less popular and less culturally relevant as a result. A television show made for mass appeal and palatability becomes more relevant than one author’s idiosyncratic novel written for the author’s own enjoyment and artistic needs. The art pieces that defy this cycle are “designed to end as photographs” (117) and be adapted to film or television. “Photographic Evangels” argues that hyper-consumerism relies on images as commodities that bear no inherent meaning but can instead be endlessly reoriented and recontextualized to sell as something new. Likewise, the erasure of the photographer is an incredibly useful tool to the surveillance state (104). “Photographic Evangels” links the spread of consumerism and surveillance to the erasure of the artist (photographer) in photography’s bid for the status of prestigious high art, foregrounding the theme of Consumerism and Contemporary Life as well as that of Surveillance and the Perception of Reality.