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Susan SontagA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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“In Plato’s Cave” compares photography to the shadows on the wall in Plato’s famous allegory. While Plato was concerned about the effects of artisanal images on people’s minds, Sontag argues that photography has introduced a nightmarish new relationship to images that Plato couldn’t have predicted—a “new visual code” (1) that reorients all of society in ways that were impossible before the invention of photography. Sontag believes that photographs give people a false sense of knowledge and power over a situation because of their ability to capture slices of time and immortalize them. This sense of knowledge and power over an event or subject makes photography a form of appropriation and social control. Photographs make reality into a series of discrete collectible instances instead of one continuous flow of events.
Sontag looks to famous photographers and organizations to illustrate how aggressive and invasive cameras are. Her two primary examples are Diane Arbus and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA sought to photograph poverty without bias. Sontag points out that even the FSA took dozens of shots before discerning which photo of their impoverished subjects best fit the bill. Arbus’s photography exemplifies the voyeuristic tourism that Sontag believes is inherent in photography. She quotes Arbus’s views on photography; Arbus herself thought it was always a “naughty” activity. Sontag notes that Arbus committed to photographing marginalized people and bodies without ever belonging to those groups of people herself. Arbus built her reputation on engaging in a kind of tourism through communities she didn’t belong to or advocate for outside of her photography. Arbus illustrates Sontag’s notion of the false power and knowledge that photography gives its viewers. She emphasizes that photography can never impart knowledge because a photograph can always be recontextualized and reinforce any argument. Sontag asserts that photographs are silent slices of time that reinforce cultural norms and status quo beliefs.
“In Plato’s Cave” introduces the broad view of photography that Sontag wishes to explore, as well as her core themes and ideological commitments. The use of Plato’s infamous cave allegory equates photographs to the shadows on the cave wall, implying that photographs are vapid, surface-level distortions of the “real” world. This comparison alludes to Sontag’s conclusions in “The Image-World” and photography’s place as a “hyper-real” object that overrides perceptions of material reality. Sontag disparages photography just as Plato disparaged the cave-dwellers for believing that the shadows on the wall were the “real” objects. Sontag’s cynical stance toward shadowlike photography and mass-produced art reveals a link between photography and surveillance in modern society that recurs throughout all the essays. “In Plato’s Cave” is a snapshot view of her work and functions for the book like an introductory paragraph does in an essay.
In the “In Plato’s Cave” essay, Sontag establishes the socioeconomic framework and materialist ideology at the heart of her philosophy, thus introducing one of the book’s central themes: Consumerism and Contemporary Life. She believes that capitalistic consumerism and photography have a symbiotic relationship in which one requires the other. Photography’s necessity to capitalistic consumption and profit generation allows photography to have consequences for art, convey perceptions of reality, and provide surveillance mechanisms for the state. This last point emphasizes another of the book’s major themes: Surveillance and the Perception of Reality. Sontag theorizes that photography functions like other commodities that European peoples brought back for consumption through colonialism. In the same way that potatoes and tomatoes forever changed European cuisine, photography ingrains itself in daily life as a commodity to consume. However, photography affects different areas of life than potatoes or tomatoes do; Sontag believes that it shapes family dynamics and how people see the world. Sontag notes that photography became an important part of familial traditions at the same time that industrialized capitalism was eroding traditional family bonds in favor of the nuclear family. Sontag’s argument for the effects of photography is fundamentally an argument about the degree of control that economics and commodities have over industrialized society, which highlights another of the book’s primary themes: Art and Power Dynamics.
The photograph’s ability to radically reorient consumerist society indicates that for-profit commodities have enormous control over everyday life and culture. Sontag notes that industrialized societies instill citizens with a guilt complex for not working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When the upper-middle classes in such nations go on vacation, they inevitably feel guilty for relaxing and not working. Sontag argues that photography abroad gives these tourists the sensation of “working” to assuage their guilt (7). The thrust of her argument is that the camera industry relies heavily on the feelings of guilt associated with relaxing to sell tourists a fun remedy for their guilty feelings in the form of a camera with which to bring home souvenirs, ultimately reshaping how people view the world abroad through photographs. The figure of the tourist in this essay illustrates a complex, interwoven web of economic conditions, social mores, and cultural history surrounding economics and work that create a perfect storm for cameras to reorient people’s lives toward hyper-consumerism.
By Susan Sontag
Art
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Challenging Authority
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Power
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