Tuesday Reads: Susan Sontag
© Spandita Malik, Nári.
“A society which makes it normative to aspire never to experience privation, failure, misery, pain, dread disease, and in which death itself is regarded not as natural and inevitable but as a cruel, unmerited disaster, creates a tremendous curiosity about these events–a curiosity that is partly satisfied through picture-taking.”
The history of humanity can be seen as a continuous and strenuous attempt to catalogue and organise the forms of chaos around us. Whatever experience falls beyond our control must be either avoided with all means, or thoroughly explored. Most experiences that trouble our existence, however, cannot be avoided for long – which is exactly why they bother us – nor be explained exhaustively enough to predict their effect on our lives – given the subjective nature of our reaction to stimuli – hence they gradually become taboos. Given the inability to fully comprehend their working, the human mind reaches a compromise which, over time, has become a social norm: All of us shall go through these unpleasant sensations and keep the experience as private as possible. Let us publicly share successes and moments of joy, let us gloss over our failures and the isolation we coexist with. Admitting to experience misery or failure is widely linked with the sensation of shame. The outcome, quite unpredictably, is that every member of society is left wondering whether she is the only one to actually experience those hardships.
© Kristina Varaksina, Human reflections
As the fields of both technology and psychology progress, one would expect a widespread acceptance of what being human means. One would expect that, after millennial testimony of how natural psychologic distresses and failures are, we would have reached the awareness that these states are part of our experiences – a fundamental one. However, admitting that one is not exempt from traversing these difficult stages of life still makes us ashamed of ourselves, almost as an acknowledgement of our ineptitude.
Having observed that such awareness is far from being reached, the choice over the tool to be employed in investigating these neglected sensations still relies on individual preference: writing? painting? reading? photographing?
© Serge Attukwei Clottey.
Photography, given its dual nature of informational tool and means towards the creation of art, embodies the perfect candidate to analyse those sensations which must be, sooner or later, experienced by all (though preferably in private and briefly): privation, failure, misery, pain, dread disease. By facing a subject and its gaze, the photographer gains the possibility to observe these states in company and from a distance, rather than firsthand and on her own.
© Max Miechowski, A big fat sky.
The camera, in addition to facilitating a situation in which the purest form of empathy – staring into someone’s eyes, in silence – can occur, somehow exerts the opposite effect as well – by placing the photographer on a different level, as an observer detached from the humanity in front of her eyes. Thus, the photographer’s quest for clarity regarding human sensations inevitably entails some sense of being different from the photographed, exempt from its suffering. Exactly due to the duality intrinsic to photographic exploration, such media can only partly satisfy our curiosity. And exactly due to this inevitably partial understanding, photographers almost never reach the point of being satisfied with their work.
© Marika Nacci, Overdrive.
© Vivian Keulards
At this point, one can’t help but wonder why reaching a satisfactory translation of these ever fleeting taboos turns out to be so complex. Is it due to the stigma linked with publicly admitting our vulnerability? Or is it due to the nature of the media, which tends to fragment reality rather than unify it? Whatever the case, our persistence in the attempt leads to a clear cut conclusion: our constant dissatisfaction fuels the need to find that missing piece. The therapeutic potential of photography lies as much in the exploration and study of reality ex ante as it does in observing photographs.
