Dorothea Lange (1939) Lighthearted kids in Merrill FSA camp.
In the opening of Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ (1977) she says: “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still revelling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” Sontag compares people in modern society to prisoners who can only watch images projected on a wall. The reason why Sontag used Plato’s cave as an analogy is to reveal the essence of photography: while approaching reality, it rejects reality. Her views (as an outsider) caused some controversy in the field of photography. But it is this kind of attention from the outside that gives different perspectives on photography—just like the slave who escapes into the light in Plato’s analogy. What is the relationship between photography and the real world? Can the images that we share and collect represent the real world? The photo seems to be an indisputable evidence of the existence of things, but what I will argue in the essay is that with the development of photography, not only has belief in the authenticity of photography become expanded, but Plato’s cave can still give us insights about photography.
Dorothea Lange (1936) Migrant Mother
Opinion 1: Prisoners, Authenticity and Manipulation
Like the prisoners who treat the image on the wall as real, the illusion of photography should make us wary about our present era of the explosion of imagery. But what of the photographers themselves: the images selected by people in the viewfinder must be subjective. For example, Sontag was discussing the origins of documentary photography specifically the Farm Security Administration (FSA), involving Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and others. The FSA was a government project; even using the term ‘documentary’, plays an important role in political propaganda. Here authenticity was the first essential of photojournalism, but the photographers would pose the sitter until they supported the photographer’s view of poverty. So do we use our subject to confirm our beliefs about a situation—do we have any choice are we trapped like the prisoners?
As prisoners today, we face a more complicated situation than before, we seem to have nowhere to escape—only passive acceptance and belief in the picture that the eye sees. Because of the Internet, we are more intimate with the image—it’s much easier for us to look at photos than to see the world. Looking at the pictures of the Great Wall in China is much easier than going to China. This digital image ocean has triggered a crisis of trust. But I think it is fortunate that we have tens of thousands of pieces of visual evidence that make up our ‘real world.’ Even though Lange manipulated the poor mother for a better composition, all the scenes recorded by Walker Evans were monotonously saying: the Great Depression does exist, the homeless also exist, and the useless farm tools really exist. Coupled with the efforts of other photographers (Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans and Russell Lee), these thousands of photos are the brushes that depicted the portrait of the Great Depression. In ‘What is cinema?’, André Bazin proposed that the aesthetic feature of photography is that it can reveal the truth. At the same time, he also realized that no art category can represent absolute truth, and it is impossible to record reality completely. A photo is just a point, a hundred photos are a plane, ten thousand photos which are a way we approach the real world.
Afghan Girl (1984) Steve McCurry
The development of photography has encouraged artistic expression and set a higher moral standard for photographers, but the situation is not optimistic. Authenticity as the first essential of photojournalism is losing credibility. For example, the ‘Afghan Girl’ photographer faked some of his photos sparked controversy about fraud when it emerged that the National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry—or someone who works for him—faked the content of some of his photos. McCurry had gained recognition for his depiction of then-17-year-old Sharbat Gula, in a refugee camp in Afghanistan in 1984 during the Soviet Union’s invasion of the country. McCurry’s 1.4 million Instagram followers and journalistic prestige, has a huge influence over what counts as reality on the internet (Letzter, 2016). The psychology of photographers’ fraud is very complicated, even for many critics. Only good-looking photos gain attention, but not every vivid moment can be captured. Details are true and events (attitudes) are true, but which is more important? Whether the photographer is modifying the picture for good intentions, or just for status prestige, only one point is worthy of certainty. The presentation and frequency of the ‘tragedy picture’ cannot be ignored. It is said that in the Second World War, the United States has a secret file cabinet which hid the horror pictures of the war that failed to pass censorship. In order to deal with this dilemma, and carry out mass communication , photographers add some aesthetic rhetoric to the horror: the subtle cover of the body, the light and the shadow, the metaphor of grace. But this creates another dilemma, the beauty weakens the pain. When imagery of people’s disaster is used not to evoke sympathy, but to attract a following in Facebook, this is a tragedy for photography. It is dangerous as the visual bombing of suffering makes people numb, and even turn a blind eye to suffering.
Digitalization eliminates the attributes of analogue photography, but it has triggered rather than eliminated the crisis of trust. Photography has gone through a cycle, from imitating painting to the pursuit of the ultimate reproduction, and now, the pursuit of digital performance. In the face of a more complex social environment, the primary task of photography is not to be trapped in the relationship between reproduction and performance. Images should consider more accurate positioning. Technology is not a evil that destroys the authenticity of photography, in contrast, it provides a larger platform. When images shoulder the burden of conveying information, they must be loyal to nature, but when it is a tool to express the artist’s subjective feelings, it is a pair of wings to fly away from it .
Opinion 2: who controls the puppets?
When the cost of making images becomes extremely low, each of us are the ‘other people’ who control the shadow puppets in Plato’s cave. We can see thousands of images on IG, FB every day and of course, there are our own works. We don’t care how we see the world, but we care more about how others evaluate our world. Who are the ‘other people’ gatekeeping knowledge now? Sontag’s view was that photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe: “They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” How does this ethic develop with the self-obsessed ‘selfies’; do people know they are agreeing to see the world in a different way? If as Sontag argues, photographs are really experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness—when the images we create today are made for sharing online is this still the experience of being trapped in a cave: are we projecting our own shadows? Different from the self-portraits of great painters in the early years, the selfie is because the technical means lower the threshold of “flaunt”.
Richard Prince (2014) Untitled
Everyone sees the world in the same way, mostly following established social and ethical standards. It’s just that we choose different sides and project shadows on the wall. Posting a selfie on Instagram might be a casual expression, but the work behind it can be very formal. We carefully design the light, angle, background, and the magic of the retouching software, and finally create a beautified self and then post it to social media. From a psychological point of view, this is typical impression management behaviour—manipulating the impression we leave on others. Impression management is an instinct that is the same for both men and women. Unlike the documentary photography mentioned above, the most important role of a selfie is to attract attention. James Franco, a famous American actor, has pointed out that “attention seems to be the name of the game when it comes to social networking. In this age of too much information at a click of a button, the power to attract viewers amid the sea of things to read and watch is power indeed.” For James, the selfie will bring a variety of accusations, such as being self-centred, but he firmly believes that this is the current visual culture, that it can quickly convey emotions, where and what to do, and that this will be more intuitive more than a text message. He further compares selfies to a person-in-person representation (mini-me) in a network, which allows others to perceive your existence, as if looking at the eyes of a visitor: Hey, this is me.
High resolution visualization of all 4535 covers of Time magazine (1923-2009).
Selfies are a way to confirm your identity in the struggle for the digital survival of human beings—it has a feeling of participating in reality. When thousands of Selfie photos come together, we can see some group features and even map out a region’s features. Lev Manovich, a professor of computer science at the City University of New York, conducted a study of selfie photographs of people in five cities (New York, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Bangkok, Berlin). There are several interesting conclusions. For example, the selfie only accounts for 4% of people’s photo content, and this is a game for young people, with an average age of 23.7, and people in Bangkok and Sao Paulo prefer to smile. Does this prove that people in Bangkok and Sao Paulo live a happier life? It needs more scientific evidence for this matter. But the “group” selfie can be a strong evidence of the characteristics of the group.
Charles Baudelaire (1855) Nadar
Opinion 3 Returning to the Cave
In the allegory, Plato writes: “And if they could talk to one another, don’t you think they’d suppose that the names they used applied to the things they see passing before them?” Plato’s point is that the prisoners’ language refers to the shadows rather than to the real things that cast the shadows. Plato’s point is that there are things we can only grasp with the mind. When the prisoners are free they can turn and see real objects. But when the liberated prisoner returns to the cave, he argues and fights with the trapped prisoners who refuse to believe they are seeing an illusion. This scene reminds me of the hardships of photography entering the noble palace of art. Even Baudelaire thought photography was a refuge for incompetent and lazy people. His response mirrors the distrust of the prisoners who hear of an outside world: it was ‘A madness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun-worshippers’ (Baudelaire, 1859). He wanted escape and felt that it was “useless and tedious to represent what exists because nothing that exists satisfies me” he preferred “the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial.” Baudelaire’s (1852-6) ‘Correspondences’ reduces any Realist aesthetic to irrelevance in favour of ‘forest of symbols’ involving subjective associations and metaphorical forms rather than photography’s sense of the exact reproduction of Nature. At the advent of photography he stated:
Are we to suppose that a people whose eyes are growing used to considering the results of a material science as though they were the products of the beautiful, will not in the course of time have singularly diminished its faculties of judging and of feeling what are among the most ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation? (Baudelaire, 1859).
Baudelaire believes that art is contrary to photography. A precise record of nature kills man’s poetic inner life. One hundred years later, photography has already transcended the “recording of reality” and turned into a tool for photographers to express themselves. So what has happened to our appreciation of things beyond the reach of the camera or is everything now being photographed? From Dadaism to Surrealism, photography is getting farther and farther away from a record: nature and science, machines and people are intertwined. The definition of photography is far more than a two-dimensional picture. Defining its category as art is one of the most difficult things. Virtual Reality is set to explode in the coming decade and it may well have a huge impact on the world of photography. People with a VR headset, can not only can see the picture, hear the sound, and even experience the touch, but they can walk in reality and memory. The movie “Ready Player One” describes a future social model—in the virtual world of images, people can not only fall in love but even participate in horror movies in person.
Ready Player One (2018) Steven Spielberg
As a viewer, I look forward to this immersive way of experiencing image art. Accepting new things is always a step-by-step process, accepting new things is always a gradual process. Questioning, anger, understanding, and acceptance are essential processes. If we refuse to accept new things like prisoners in the cave, it is from ignorance or that we choose to blindfold in life. Virtual Reality’s claim to ‘record anything’ sounds very arrogant, but it’s undeniable that we’re working hard towards this goal. Is it Plato’s cave? The process seems to enable us to walk into a garden, you can look around, or even get sidetracked, but please don’t refuse to walk into this garden.
Conclusion
Plato’s cave as a classic analogy has enlightened countless philosophers, educators, and art critics, all of whom interpret the fable from their own perspective. As far as photography is concerned, Susan Sontag’s interpretation of ‘cave theory’ cannot be ignored. With the development of society and the emergence of new technologies, the importance of images has become increasingly prominent, and new topics have emerged. Like Socrates considering philosophy, I think that photography should provoke people to think about and understand the world, not to direct people to an unknown world. The reality of photography has become an option, not a necessity, and our general discussion of absolute truth is obviously unreasonable. As a compensation for the loss of authenticity, photography provides a larger stage for the artist’s subjective expression. The improvement of mobile phone hardware and social networks make selfies become the most popular communication mode for young people. In addition to showing people’s ‘beauty’, a large number of selfies will become “group images”, which become important evidence to verify certain features of this group. Looking back at the development of photography history, the emergence of new technologies will always cause panic and confusion among some people. The questioning can expand our point of view, but refusing technology means a retrogression in history. Technology does not let photography disappear, it only expands the meaning of photography There are always smarter people in the world than ourselves, we should have the greatest goodwill for new things.
Bibliography
- Bazin, André (2004) What is cinema?, (Volumes I and II), University of California Press.
- Baudelaire, Charles (1859) On Photography, from The Salon of 1859, from (1955) Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, Jonathan Mayne editor and translator, London, Phaidon Press Limited, https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art109/readings/11%20baudelaire%20photography.htm
- Letzter, Rafi (2016) The ‘Afghan Girl’ photographer faked some of his photos. Does it matter?, Business Insider, http://uk.businessinsider.com/steve-mccurry-photo-editing-scandal-2016-5?r=US&IR=T
- Plato (2007) Republic, Penguin Classics; 3rd edition, H.D.P. Lee (Translator), https://web.stanford.edu/class/ihum40/cave.pdf
- Sontag, Susan (2008) On Photography, Penguin Classics.
- Franco, J. (2013) The Meanings of the Selfie. The New York Times. [Online] Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/arts/the-meanings-of-the-selfie.html?hpw&rref=technology&_r=1&
- Manovich, L. Selfiecity
Available at: http://selfiecity.net/#intro
New Minds Eye 