On reading 'On Photography'

Last night I settled down to read the second essay of Susan Sontag's book 'On Photography', entitled 'America, Seen through Photographs, Darkly'.  I was drawn to read Sontag for several reasons.  I'll shortly be applying for an MA in Contemporary Art Theory and know I have a lot of reading to do, if I'm to convince the University that a literature graduate and a novelist is now serious about shifting her attention to art history - and I do want to go in at MA level, rather than doing a BA in art history.  But why get into the reading with Sontag?  I saw a spread in the Observer recently, photographs of her, taken by her partner Annie Leibovitz, photographs that chronicled the decline of Sontag's health.  And I was reminded of Sontag's vibrancy when she visited UEA to give a lecture about her novel 'The Volcano Lover'. 

So I guess these facts led to me, eventually, picking up the book and beginning.  I love it, of course.  I'm learning so much and so fast, it's intoxicating.  This second essay focussed particularly on the  Jewish American photographer Diane Arbus.  I was drawn in, reading about the difference between the work of Alfred Stieglitz and Arbus.  Both photographers attracted huge crowds when they exhibited at MOMA.  Stieglitz, according to Sontag, made concrete the ideals of Walt Whitman - the aim was to show that all humanity is "one" - yet the images of people from sixty-eight countries were all "beautiful".  Arbus's work however, defied that ideal.  She photographed "monsters and borderline cases - most of them ugly; wearing grotesque or unflattering clothing; in dismal or barren surroundings".   Arbus, formally a fashion photographer, photographed 'freaks', "a hermaphrodite with a dog, a tattooed man, and an albino sword-swallower". 

Sontag suggests that when we look at these photographs, we know that humanity is not 'one'; we experience a sense of relief that these people are 'other'.  All of which, of course, raises a lot of questions about the morality of Arbus's work - and I was interested to read today, that Germaine Greer has condemned the voyeurism of the work.

I was pretty shocked, too, when I read about Arbus's suicide.  Why?  Because the suicide of creative artists is a subject I've studied in relation to my novel 'Bluethroat Morning' but I'd somehow managed to miss Arbus's story.  Once again, I'd stumbled upon an artist who fascinated me; once again I was fascinated by a suicide case.  Sontag writes a sentence which is only too familiar to me:

"The fact of her suicide seems to guarantee that her work is sincere, not voyeuristic, that it is compassionate, not cold.  Her suicide also seems to make the photographs more devastating, as if it proved the photographs to have been dangerous to her."

It brought back the words I wrote in my novel "Bluethroat Morning",

"When she stopped her life, she also fixed it.  She will never write bad books.  She will never grow old."

I don't believe in the idea that true artists must by nature be self-destructive, but I do think it's a damn dangerous myth. 

Sontag, however, differentiates between the self-destructive writer and the self-destructive photographer.  She writes, "Still, there is a large difference between the activity of a photographer, which is always willed, and the activity of a writer, which may not be.  One has the right to, may feel compelled to, give voice to one's own pain - which is, in any case, one's own property.  One volunteers to seek out the pain of others."

I believe there's a fundamental mistake in this thinking however - because writers too can seek out painful stories; they don't have to mine their own pain.  Equally, a photographer who seeks out a painful subject may be doing so as an expression of her own emotion. 

I was also struck by this:  "much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible".  As I begin my investigation into my own beliefs about contemporary art, I'll hold onto this idea.  It seems we are in fact so saturated by terror that it can no longer make an impact.  I question whether we might, indeed, return to beauty?  Or find something else?  Isn't it the lack of 'something else' that keeps so many artists tied to tired ideas that have barely changed since Duchamp?

According to Sontag, Arbus's interest in freaks is a way of violating her own innocence, venting her frustration at being 'safe'.  Is that what many contemporary artists are doing?  It's as good a question as any and may be an interesting place to begin.