JANE PICKERSGILL
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs… flicker and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object…. easy to carry about, accumulate, store.
Photography is the one art that has managed to carry out the grandiose, century-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility.
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
“In my view” wrote Zola “you can not claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it”.
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex.
Cameras define reality: as a spectacle, and as an object of surveillance. The freedom to consume…. plural images…. is equated with freedom itself.
Back to Critical Analysis
Since starting to use photography as a development stage in my work this book is a reference point. Here is a selection of Sontag's own words which chime with my practice. Along with Feuerbach's quote (below right), Sontag was remarkably prophetic in her words 'today everything exists to end in a photograph'.
There is a steady recycling of the artefacts and tastes of the past. Clichés, recycled, become meta-clichés. Images of real things are interlayered with images of images.
Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is also a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world, and the two uses are complementary. …the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away.
In 1843 Feuerbach observes about “our era” that it prefers the “image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being”. His premonitory complaint has been transformed in the twentieth century into a widely agreed-on diagnosis: that a society becomes “modern” when one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images…images which are themselves coveted substitutes for first-hand experience.