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Episode: The Ethics of Seeing in Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” (Part 2)
Pub date: 2026-03-23
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powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarization Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image.
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Transcript
0:12 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography. We're covering In Plato's Cave and America Seen Through Photographs Darkly, which I've been bringing in a little bit primarily, but we've just been talking about In Plato's Cave. And I want to continue talking about the implied ethics, I want to call it, of Sontag's critique of photography by speaking of the ways in which photographs inure us. I think Sontag is very subtly setting up a shadow of that in which she's implying that there might be a different relationship to photography which we could somehow inculcate in ourselves.
I wonder if we can use this essay, in other words, to spin out some theories about what Sontag would say is a more ethical relationship to the photographic image. I think there's a suggestion in a couple of places what that might be. Well, she has this idea, as we've already covered, that there is something aggressive and therefore imperialistic about photography, and also that it flattens and democratizes the world at the same time. And therefore, in a strange sort of way, I think her middle Ground, or what she might be very subtly advocating for, is a kind of aristocracy of images.
A word which I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable using. And I don't want to put words in her mouth, but a curation of images which suggests a kind of hierarchical relationship. So the place that I'm getting this. And you'll tell me if I'm crazy for drawing this conclusion, but the place that I'm getting this is when she talks about. Photographs are themselves packaged. They're a way of packaging the world, and they somehow invite packaging. And then she talks about a photograph working well in a book. Because unlike a painting, which is not smooth and not printed out, a photograph already is smooth and printed.
So when it's reproduced in a book, it keeps much of its essential quality. And she says, but still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme. For putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging and enlarging still photographs.
Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed. And there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. So that's where. That's where I'm getting this curation scheme from. You have a bunch of photographs in a book. You might open it up and flip through, and you're almost, you know, your eyes are kind of glazing over. You're not really looking at anything. You're not giving an equal amount of time to distinct images. And so she's implying that when photographs are in a film in which each photograph is given a set amount of time by some.
Some director or some curator of these images who's forcing you to look at just say one photo for 15 seconds and then the next photo for 20 seconds. That this creates a different kind of relationship to the image and the person who is making this film. Curating this selection, determining the order, determining the amount of time allotted to each individual photograph is doing you a service, it seems. That's kind of what she's implying about this Chris Marker film, in which there's an imposed order. And she says, as a result, a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact.
So to me, that implies that there is a better way to consume images. And that is by having someone who presumably knows More than we do curating that experience of images. For us, there might be some sort of curatorial relationship which is better than our current democratized, willy nilly relationship with images. Do you see where I'm getting this aristocratic.
4:24 Wes: Yeah. So there's not a lot in this essay that's positive. You know, we'll get to the way it concludes in a second. Which seems pretty globally negative. I mean, right? There are hints of the positive when she says, for instance, that after looking at Holocaust photos, I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten. Something went dead, something is still crying. So that's actually just a mixed picture right there. Grief, I think, would be a positive effect and would serve the ethical. Right. So one question is, to what extent can photography serve the political and the ethical?
To what extent can it arouse conscience? And then to what extent does it arouse all these other feelings, like manic defenses in the sense of possessing the world and that other stuff? And the point that you're focusing on, which I think is early on in the essay. Right. Gets at the fact that a more curated relationship to images could have a more positive effect. And then we have to ask ourselves, you know, what kinds of effects are we thinking of? Are we thinking of the aesthetic, the moral, the political? Do we need them to be sequenced for us and into film form?
Or is it enough to be in a museum and to have photographs by great artists? Of course, she's going to have quite an interesting critique of Diane Arbus in the next essay, and I've only read the first two essays of this book. So given that you've read the whole book, is there a more expansive, positive picture that she gives for photography?
6:02 Erin: Okay, no. And I think that's why I'm interested in trying to find the flip side of this critique. It might be that it simply just opens up a whole other can of worms, like who gets to curate? Who decides? Is it simply that there is some aristocracy of artists implied by this, say, this film director who's curated these images and set times for them? She finds this effective. So is it that artists are the ones who can curate these for us? Well, not really, because then she also has Arbus as an artist photographer. She's selecting subjects and choosing what to photograph.
And Sontag has problems, as do I, with some of those selections. So I've set a sort of impossible task for us, which is to try and figure out what Sontag might have said or might be saying in some sort of shadow, of this essay, about what a positive relationship to photographs might be. Yeah, so it's all speculative, but there is an idea of refusal as well, of refusal of looking or a refusal to inure ourselves, which seems implicit in the. At the end of Plato's Cave and the discussion of understanding, the way the
7:14 Wes: essay wraps up, which is actually quite negative. She makes a few different negative points about photography. One is so on my page 16, she'll say the ethical content of photographs is fragile. And they're fragile because the pathos of pastness kind of swallows them up. She'll say the particular qualities and intentions of the photographs tend to be swallowed up in the general pathos of time past. So whether it's a photograph from 1900 that might have had some emotional effect back then to us, just might look old timey. And the old timeiness of it is more interesting to us than whatever pathos is there in the subject matter of the picture.
And then she gets into the sort of incorporation of photography into institutions of control, like with the police, for instance, or bureaucracy. We photograph, we have to have a photographic id. And despite all that, she'll say there's an informational value to pictures in those bureaucratic contexts. But for most people, she'll say the informational value of pictures is on the same order as that of fiction. And she compares a tabloid like the Daily News to Le Monde, which runs no photographs. And the suggestion here is that by giving us pictures, the tabloid, in fact is farther away from truth than just the written word.
And I think there's something to that. So that's what I take as the first of a kind of one, two punch at the end of the essay, a negative view of things. And then the other is more generally about photography fragmenting the world and getting at, I think, what you were. You just mentioned, which is the kind of foreclosure of genuine understanding because it makes the world seem more available than it actually is. We give ourselves the illusion of knowing things by way of the camera, the photograph. But we're denying the depth behind that surface.
And so for that reason, I think she says, this is page 18 in my book. Basically, they can never give us political or ethical knowledge. So while it can goad conscience, it can finally never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. You know, there's a little bit of positive light here, the idea that it can goad conscience, for instance, in certain contexts. And we're also not, you know, we're not hearing about film, you know, except for that part that you noted about putting still photos in sequence in a film.
Is film better? I don't know.
10:06 Erin: I think it is. I think it is. She does call television a stream of under selected images, right? Each one canceling out the one before or something like that. And so that under selection seems to kind of exonerate it in a way and also make it less interesting. I should say that I think there could be more positive. I read the first four in the book for the purposes of the podcast. I've in the past read the whole book, so I could be just not remembering a more positive. She does say in one of the essays, for instance, I remember that photographs don't teach us about surprising things that are ugly.
You know, they don't surprise us really with ugliness, but they can surprise us with beauty. So that they could be a way to find more in the world, which is surprisingly beautiful. So that would be an example of something I could think of which is a positive statement about photography. But for the most part, the relentless criticism. And she's someone who enjoyed film, and film has a bunch of implications which make it fall outside of the critiques that she levies against photographs. Like just the mere fact that if it's a. If it's a film with a plot, it's not purporting to be an image of something real or of something that really happened.
I mean, it is insofar as those actors really were all standing together in a room. Maybe not anymore, but it used to be evidence that they were all standing together in a room. But I think it has just a vastly different set of moral qualities about it. But she says only that which narrates can make us understand and that we need narrative. Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no, Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.
And then later in the paragraph, only that which narrates can make us understand. So this. This very idea that we need narration is, I think, what I'm getting at here when I'm describing that she's implicitly making this argument that aristocracy is some kind of middle road. That can help, because I think that's. That's the implication of needing a narrative who is only that which narrates can make us understand. Well, what is going to narrate to us, what narration are we going to receive? Who is going to be the one who narrates? That's very opaque to me.
But it seems we do need a narrator. There are people who by implication here are in some sort of privileged position to be able to narrate these images to us.
12:40 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important. So in a way, we need a point of view. And the photograph might give us the idea that we have a view from nowhere, in a sense, but also because it can't give us all the context and it can't give us a narrative and it's outside of time in a sense. Or it doesn't cover an expanse of time. It doesn't give us the ability to fully understand, which is not by itself a problem, except that it gives us the illusion of understanding because it's. Look, there's reality.
13:09 Erin: Right, Right. And so this is where everybody is the king of their own kingdom of mental images, determining which is making up meaning from within that image world. Even though the possibility of finding meaning in a given image is entirely dependent on it being properly narrativized so that we might superimpose meanings on images which aren't really there.
13:34 Wes: She gives this great. Just around the place where you read. The camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses. In contrast to the amorous relation which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions and functioning, takes place in time and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand. I hope I didn't just reread exactly the same quote. Maybe it's worth rereading twice. So that's very important. Understanding requiring an understanding of function and therefore requiring the inclusion of time and the need for narration.
14:14 Erin: And this refusal idea, which I should tip my hand a little bit more and explain that. The reason why this stuck out to me and why I suddenly wanted to think about a positive ethics of relations of our relationship to photography is that I got into a kind of argument with somebody a couple of weeks ago when I said that I didn't like to expose myself to certain images.
14:38 Wes: Why they can't see you. Just kidding.
14:42 Erin: And I was concerned about being inured to. I mean, specifically, we were talking about Game of Thrones and I just said that I really didn't. I knew about the kinds of things that are in Game of Thrones and I did. And I realized this is obviously like dwarves, we've just been taught. Yes, exactly.
14:59 Wes: That's why you can't look at Diane Arbus either.
15:02 Erin: Exactly. No, but, you know, we were talking about that show, and I said, oh, you know, it seems like it would be a really interesting show to watch, and I just can't. I'm really hypersensitive to this. Like, I've tried to basically maintain my sensitivity by not exposing myself to certain images because I do not want to desensitize myself. And this person thought that in doing so, I was coddling myself, essentially, and that I had a fundamentally immature relationship to the subject matter by not seeing these things, which I really disagreed with.
And I. You know, all of that came back again. Somehow the Sontag came up at this interesting time where I had just had that conversation, and I thought, well, what she's really advocating for here is something similar to what I was arguing, which is a kind of hygiene of vision. Her idea seems to be that the worst thing we could do is not intervene in a situation which requires our intervention. So having a camera in our hand, I think, for Sontag, can be problematic in that there might be a situation which needs our help or our intervention. And by holding a camera, we might not be able to intervene and help someone.
We might simply be in a voyeuristic relationship to, say, a mugging. I don't know. So we should be in a position where we are able to help the person being mugged instead of just standing there going, oh, this is great. I'm capturing a mugging live on my iPhone, you know, and I'm going to broadcast it to my followers. So I think that what Sontag is saying is that we need to be able to intervene, and that is what is negative about having a camera. And that part of our ability to intervene or to even recognize that something that is happening is wrong or bad or whatever ugly or something is not being inured to those occurrences by simply being inundated with lots of examples of that so that we are no longer able to even determine that, you know, this is a very extreme example, but we're not even able to determine that a mugging is bad, right.
So that we can't even intervene in the mugging because we don't think it's particularly bad, because, well, we're inundated with images of muggings every day, so it's a normal thing. So we might as well just photograph it instead of intervening in some way. Again, that's a silly and sort of extreme example that I'm using just to illustrate what I think her point is. So something about, I think, not desensitizing ourselves seems to be important to Sontag, so that we maintain our sensitivity to things which deserve that sensitivity, so that we can be properly morally outraged when confronted with real moral outrages, and so that we can intervene when a situation needs our intervention.
I think that is ultimately what she's saying, must be preserved from the jaws of photography. But that may not be accurate and I may simply be interpreting this so as to win the mental argument that I'm still having with this person. Right. Well, I think, I mean, I think
18:09 Wes: clearly she's, you know, she's pointing to this double edged sword of the. There's the capacity of photography to arouse the conscience and then. But it can also inure us, as you're pointing out, and she points out, but. And it does that in the same way it shocks us. But then if we get shocked enough times, we can be inured. And then. So the question is, do I avoid all exposure? Do I try to titrate it? Do I try to get just the right amount of exposure? Or do I atrocity. Do atrocity porn all day? This is kind of a dilemma with the news, right?
18:48 Erin: Yes, exactly.
18:49 Wes: And it doesn't need to be photographic. I think, unfortunately, even when there's narrative, in the case of the news, it can be bad for us. So I kind of have a compromise where I look at it a little bit, but then I try not to linger over it anymore just because it's not because I have self discipline, but just because it's gotten so depressing. But it frees up a lot of time. So I want to maintain some awareness, but I don't want to harm myself by doing that. I don't want to just have my head in the sand. But on the other hand, I want to protect myself.
19:19 Erin: Just to bring in the essay here, she says to suffer is one thing. Another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. And that's really important is, I think for her is to strengthen that conscience and the ability to be compassionate, to be able to act, to be able to intervene. It can also. This is Sontag again. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more and more images. Transfix images anesthetize an event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs.
Think of the Vietnam War. But after repeated exposure to images, it also becomes less real. And I think that is a problem. She Goes on to talk about pornography and the anesthetizing that. That happens when we. When the shock of pornography wears off. And then she says in these last decades, quote, unquote, concerned photography, that is, you know, photography which is designed to arouse our ethical function by showing us atrocities that we should be outraged by. Concerned photography has done at least as to deaden conscience as to arouse it. Yeah.
So again, this sends me into, you know, this, this question of, okay, then, what is the proper amount? What is a proper comportment to images? Which sends me down that sort of aristocratic rabbit hole. Who's going to be responsible for determining what is the correct amount of exposure by the masses to these images? To a certain extent, it's. It is media corporations.
20:53 Wes: It's not going to be the sovereign. Plato in Plato's Republic. I was thinking about the argument between Plato and Aristotle earlier when you're talking about Game of Thrones, because the Platonic argument is that you could be corrupted by identifying with the person or the God doing the immoral thing. You get infected with their passions and your soul can be. Your character can be corrupted by it. And I think there's a point to that. And then the Aristotelian argument is actually. No, there's a cathartic effect. I can identify with characters, even characters doing crazy, violent things without necessarily being contaminated by them. There's a more complicated psychological relationship. I think they're both right to some extent.
21:36 Erin: Well, I think that's about the narrative element of Game of Thrones, whereas I'm concerned more with what Sontag is talking about here. I don't want those images in my head.
21:44 Wes: Yeah, well, that's a good distinction. Yeah, that's an important distinction. I was going to add to that. I do think the. It's an important point that they're talking about ancient Greek plays. Right. So there's an important visual part of this, including the masks. But leaving that aside, I think narrative is a problem too. And this came up in one of my first subtext episodes, which you were not on, but it about Slaughterhouse 5. And there's a worry in that novel about can you write about any of this without actually sensationalizing it or glorifying it in some way?
Can you do that with war? Because war is exciting. And so even for narration, I think it becomes a problem or remains a problem, let's put it that way. I think narration helps. Well, let me give another example. When I was an animal healthcare reporter, worked for the Animal Healthcare magazine, I wrote a very Positive. I'm sure I've told this story before, but I wrote a very positive profile of someone who started one of the first animal cruelty sections within a police department. Yeah. She wasn't happy with the profile because it was fictionalized.
Not because I put in any wrong facts, but just because I created a narrative. I created a story out of it, tried to make it interesting to an audience. And that by itself, even if everything is. We fact checked. We had a fact checker calling people. That by itself is distorting. That's kind of why I said you need a point of view. You need someone to be an essayist. I think in the end, whether they're doing that with photographs or with words or with a documentary. And that's the other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about sequencing in time.
And you can write. Documentaries will include photographic stills often, and then contextual narrative around it. Think of something like Ken Burns, and then you have the right music, you got it all.
23:33 Erin: Great actors to read out letters.
23:36 Wes: Good voice, good narrators. Such good voices. The problem she's identifying doesn't go away. There's something better about the idea that one is involved in an essay. One is involved in making a point or having a point of view. And that it's not just a view from nowhere. I take a picture of my cat. Yep, that's my cat. She really exists. That's objective reality. But if I take a picture of her posing. Because she's also a model supermodel and she likes to pose. Yeah, that's an opinion. I mean, it's not an opinion that she's a supermodel. That's a fact.
Or that she's beautiful. But it's. The particular posing in the photograph is an opinion. And that's a segue to chapter two, America Seen Through Photographs Darkly. Because it. Or to the second essay. Sorry, because it. Right. Part of the point is that Arbus is. She's got an agenda. She's got a certain opinion. And it's a kind of leveling thing where everything is made grotesque, whether it's actual freaks or just suburbanites. And this kind of condescending attitude towards suburbanites is something you interestingly see in contemporary streaming shows.
Isn't it quaint that people are so normal? Aren't they cute?
24:55 Erin: Yes, that's right.
24:57 Wes: But it starts from. And I mean, it's such a great essay, but it starts from this. She traces it back to kind of. To Walt Whitman's idea of a democratic embrace of all experience, where I Think the point is to lift up ordinary life and say, oh, isn't everything majestic in some sense? Or isn't everything a manifestation of God or whatever? So it's in the same tradition, but it's actually leveling down rather than leveling up. But at least we know there's curation to that. But at least we understand, even if we don't like that project, that we're engaged with someone who is engaged in that kind of what you'll call surrealist project. For depicting America as a surrealist nation.
25:42 Erin: The hyper selection of Arbus work really suggests a distinct point of view, much like the HBO imperative to deliberately show things as disgusting as they could possibly be for the purposes of titillation. But they I was most interested in. In her analysis of Arbus character, she ultimately ascribes a naivete which is both coy and sinister. She says in the photograph's acceptance of the appalling. This is at the paragraph beginning. The most striking aspect of Arbus's work is that she seems to have enrolled in one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises, concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate, but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
She talks about Arbus's aggressiveness toward the public, which has been treated as a moral accomplishment. This is just a fabulous essay. I love this essay. I think this is the best thing ever written about Arbus, who, if she did bother you before, will certainly bother you after you read this. Yeah. So the naivete of these photographs, Sontag says, is both coy and sinister, for it is based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other. Sontag says that there's a deliberate desire on Arbus part to inure us, to deaden our response to this kind of thing or to show us things that are shocking.
And then the comportment that we have, say, in the art gallery, I mean, you know, we can imagine being people in the early 60s encountering this in a gallery. We're supposed to not be horrified by this or not show that we're horrified by this. Right. We're supposed to actually affect total nonchalance in the face of some very disturbing
27:32 Wes: images like that nudist camp woman with the apron. Yes, yes, topless, but except for an apron, because you don't want to spill coffee on yourself. You want to get coffee all over your thighs. I don't know.
27:49 Wes: There's times when clothing is just necessary. Okay, maybe not stay warm, but she
27:55 Erin: calls this a Self willed test of hardness, both on the part of Arbus and I suppose on the part of the people who look at Arbus photographs. And that ultimately the intent that people like Arbus have in going out and collecting these images of pain is not to feel more, but to feel less. And that too seems to be part of an inherent part of Sontag's say, moral vision, such as we can piece it together in these two essays, which is that we should be trying to feel more, not less. So I would say that this deadening is for Sontag a very negative thing, that we should be trying to preserve some kind of sensitivity.
And because she says here, here, here is the key, it works out not as a liberation of, but as a subtraction from the self. A pseudo familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life. I think that's as much kind of the moral key for Sontag as any sentence in here. So that subtraction from the self is what happens, I think, when she's saying, when we expose ourselves to these deadening images, we actually have less self as a result of this. In a way, it's what you're describing with the belief that being photographed takes away part of your soul or something like that.
This is Sontag's transmogrification of that idea.
29:16 Wes: There's a part just for the one that you're focusing in on, where she talked about. Whitman preached empathy, concord and discord, oneness and diversity, psychic intercourse with everything, everybody plus sensual union. When he could get it is the giddy trip that is proposed explicitly over and over again in the prefaces of the poems. This longing to proposition the whole world also dictated his poetry's form and tone. Whitman's poems are a psychic technology for chanting the reader into a new state of being and then a little lower, meant to get readers psychically airborne, to boost them up to the height where they can identify with the past and with the community of American desire.
But this message of identification with other Americans is foreign to our temperament now. So yeah, with Whitman you get this impetus to merger in a way with the past and with others, this impulse to oneness. And that's precisely what you're not getting with Arbus. The monsters that she's photographing are not inviting you to identify with them. Right, Since a lot of them are ugly. People can go look at her, her photography, but it's basically like trying to create a freak show out of everything, even out of maybe a normal couple standing there, depending on the way things are framed.
So there's a kind of anti humanist message here, according to Sontag.
30:48 Erin: Yes. And Arbus doesn't want you to feel distance from that, though that's what's really interesting. Is this not. What was the word you used with Whitman?
30:58 Wes: Identification or merging?
31:00 Erin: Identification or merger. You're not supposed to feel that identification at all. But what's aggressive Sontag is saying about the photos is that she doesn't allow you to feel any distance from them. So it's like you're in close quarters with the other. And it's designed to make you feel this intense discomfort for that closeness and for the way in which these people are being photographed. And yet that feeling, that otherness, very intensely is part of it. So it's a sort of anti merger. You're put up close and it's designed to induce this reaction of discomfort, embarrassment, pain, shock, all of these things, which words which I think Sontag uses to characterize the experience of being in contact with these images.
The most interesting observation, I think for me in the whole essay is when Sontag says that Arbus's interest in freaks. This is on page 43 in my Picador edition. Arbus's interest in freaks expresses a desire to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged to vent her frustration at being safe. I love that. That's. I think that's really key. I think a lot of people are reacting against safety by trying to, say, manufacture instances in which they remain safe but which feel unsafe to try and shock themselves into some. What they perceive as being some sort of more authentic relationship with the world.
Anyway, I found that to be incredibly insightful and fascinating and it was somehow recognizable to me. It's psychologically revealing about Arbus, but it also reveals something about maybe what we might call the false promise of photography, which is to give us a sense that we've experienced something outside of our comfort zone in a way which is prepackaged and which doesn't actually come with any of the attendant, say, moral lessons that real experience might provide. Do you know what I'm saying? So there's something, I think illustrative about all of our relationship with photography in the character analysis she does of Arbus in this moment.
Though it's also very specific and interestingly revealing about Arbus particular character.
33:12 Wes: Yeah, she says that the photographs in a way are too cool for school. It's like the compassionate response to them is supposed to be irrelevant. We're not supposed to feel horrified. Right. When we look at the Pictures, we're too cool for that kind of thing. And one might see that as a kind of way to destigmatize and to level experience and say, well, nothing is really freaky or everything is really freaky. But I think she sees it as a kind of unsavory inurement to reality. Right?
33:42 Wes: She contrasts Arbus kind of middle class or privileged, maybe upper middle class, yes, quite privileged Jewish existence and this enhanced desire to seek out a kind of corrective for that, to seek out some sort of adversity and violate her own incidents, sorry, innocence and you know, overcome the sense of being privileged.
34:08 Erin: I think everybody is suffering from this to a certain extent in the modern era because we don't actually have enough friction in our lives. And I think we feel the lack of what we might call experiences that are meaning making or character building because we're not suffering in the ways that previous generations have suffered. I mean people are certainly, they're suffering in different ways, but ways which are maybe less legible to us than what we're used to or what we think of in our minds as being acceptable or historically ways in which we might develop ourselves.
And I think people feel the lack of that and they try to create those almost like self impose that suffering through a variety of other means. And so I think that is a little bit of what Sontag is getting at here. This is the way that Arbus is trying to do it by taking these close up shots with, with these people who look freaky and forcing us to look at it and be uncomfortable. And then we're supposed to just sort of look at it and act very nonchalant. And I remember being in a, I remember being in a museum with a, with a friend of mine from college who had none of the, I guess, training and nonchalance that people usually get at some point than going to museums or just, I don't know, learning, learning some sort of disaffected behavior from the people around them.
And so we went into some modern art exhibit. I don't even remember what it was, but I just remember her going, oh my God, you know, like, like really loudly having these reactions and calling a lot of attention to herself. And now of course reading this, I'm like, of course, you know, she was actually doing the exact right thing. And probably Sontag would approve of that reaction because it's proof that she hadn't been anesthetized. She's actually having a real authentic reaction rather than a put on of, mmm, yeah, you're looking at something horrifying and you're supposed to just shrug your shoulders and walk on to the next image and brush it off.
I think to a certain extent Sontag is saying we should maybe refuse to do that or we should recognize the falseness in doing that at least.
36:12 Wes: Yeah, there's a cynicism to it. And this maybe we can give listeners a taste of the way she ends the essay. Bringing it back to Whitman and making equivalences between freaks, mad people, suburban couples and nudists is a very powerful judgment, one in complicity with a recognizable political mood shared by many educated left liberal Americans. The subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. Only as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different, Whitman's democratic vista.
Everybody is shown to look the same. Succeeding the more buoyant hopes for America has come. A bitter, sad embrace of experience. There's a particular melancholy in the American Photographic project, but the melancholy was already latent in the heyday of Whitman esque affirmation, including Stieglitz. So I'm skipping a little bit. So the Whitman esque appetites have turned pious. The photographer now patronizes reality photographers with less ego and magnetism. than Stieglitz gradually gave up the struggle. They might continue to practice atomistic visual stenography.
The atomistic visual stenography inspired by Whitman, but without Whitman's delirious powers of synthesis. What they documented was discontinuity, detritus, loneliness, greed, sterility. So it ends in a way on the same note as the last essay with this movement towards atomism. Right. We started out with Whitman's leveling, being about a movement towards unity. And this is still a leveling, but it's more about we all end up the same level as our own little freaky disconnected atoms, rather than being somehow ennobled together.
38:03 Erin: I mean, it just gets worse from here. Right. There's no stopping this train. So maybe I've been wrong all along to look for some sort of alternative or instructions for a solution.
38:17 Wes: America has been discovered as the quintessential surrealist country. That's the one that I wanted to get to. This idea of succumbing to surrealism.
38:28 Wes: So quite pessimistic. And it sounds like from what, you know, the rest of the book, there's not much optimism.
38:36 Erin: Well, I mean, yeah. Though I don't want to give listeners the impression that these aren't exhilarating and really fun essays to read.
38:43 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think you're doing well as a country if you have a writer like this. Yeah, she's amazing. So. Yeah, that's why I talked about a point of view in the essay. In the end, this is an argument for being a great essayist as opposed to a stenographer. And photography lends itself to stenography.
39:05 Wes: All right. Any last words before we put America to bed? No.
39:10 Erin: No. I love that. Sontag herself is the solution. That's music to my ears.
39:18 Wes: All right. Thank you.
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