The Ethics of Seeing in Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”

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. Upcoming Episodes: Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:12 Erin: 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. Today we're discussing two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography in Plato's Cave and Seen Through Photographs Darkly, and asking what constitutes photography's ethics of seeing and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, just coincidentally, I've been printing out tons of photographs over the last few days of my sister at various stages of her life because I'm the maid of honor for her wedding and I'm throwing her bridal shower. So, you know, we had decided to cover these essays. And then just over the last couple days, I happened to be looking through old family photo albums anyway, so it's been a strange thing to read these essays in tandem with that. And I've been thinking about how attached I am. I wouldn't say that I take a lot of photos, but I love photos. I love photos of family. I have photos everywhere, and various apartments I've lived in have always been covered in photos. I just wonder what your relationship is. You don't strike me as someone who takes a lot of photos either. Do you have a lot of photo albums? Are there certain photos that you love looking at? Do you have attachments to photos? 2:10 Wes: I do have some photo albums and I used to curate those much more actively when I was in my 20s and maybe 30s, but because it's become much less common to actually, you know, there was a time when you had to take your disposable camera to the. To the pharmacy and have them do their magic. And you. 2:32 Erin: I'm going to the pharmacy after this to pick up. Oh, really? Yeah, because I'm making displays which are for the bridal shower, so I have to go pick up prints from CVS for the first time in years. Just later this afternoon. 2:48 Wes: Amazing. That's the. 2:49 Erin: The coincidences that. Bizarre. 2:51 Wes: Yeah. You know, and then you'd have to wait a couple weeks or whatever, and it was. But sad to say, I think the. What do you even call them? What's the thing? You keep your photos in the binder. Those are in storage. And I've digitized everything. I digitized everything. And I digitized a bunch of my mom's photos that she had kind of lying around because I wanted some of those. But she would always. She's always worried about me taking her photos. You know, like, it was always a thing with my mom and me. Like, she accused me of stealing her books, which I. Which I did, and taking the taking as a kid, you know, like taking her books out of her room and putting them in my room or out of the living room and just putting them on the shelves in my room. But anyway, yeah, now I have a digital collection, and I can't say that I spend a lot of time looking at that, except for pictures of my cat. Those are like the main pictures that I take if I go on a vacation. So recently I was in Tucson and went up to Mount Lemmon and did various things. So I'll take a few photos. How do I put this? I don't take a lot. I don't like the way it. It's, you know, for reasons that Sontag talks about, the way it interrupts the experience, or it feels like I'm trying to behave in an acquisitive way towards the experience or commodify it. And also, I don't know what the point is exactly. I mean, you see people taking so many photos. It's like, how would you ever have the time in your life to go back and look at all the photos that you're taking? No one's going to even have the time. It goes into the cloud, the cloud storage, and that's it. And it's reassuring to know that it exists there. So you have that you could go back to it, but she probably won't. 4:39 Erin: It occurred to me that a lot of what Sontag covers in the essays is just even more apparent now with the iPhone. And so a lot of this seems to me to be super relevant. But one of the phenomena that I've been talking about with a friend of mine in relation to this. Yeah, just these thousands and thousands of images that live on our phones or on our computers is, I think, this further, I don't know, democratization of experience that she's talking about, which is, you know, how you go into. Into iphotos and it'll show you. Well, first of all, everything is organized by date. There are maps, too. Like, you could look at the map of the world and see the photos that you've taken in different locations. But specifically this on this date function where it will show you what you were doing on the same day a year ago, five years ago, whatever. And Facebook does this too, right? With Facebook memories, which I was obsessed with for a while, probably around the time that it first rolled out or when I first noticed it, which might have been a long time afterwards. And it had this curious effect, specifically the days in which it would. There was nothing that you had posted on that day in all the years that you've had Facebook, if you, if you know it's today is March 2nd, if there was nothing that you ever did on March 2nd that you posted on Facebook about it would tell you you have no memories on this day, which I thought was, you know, chilling. And it would. It almost spurs you to want to. I mean, it doesn't for me, but it would spur you to want, know what you were doing on that day or to post something so that next year, on March 2, you would have something that, you know, some evidence that you existed on that day. But in, in relation to this, this democratization, it's as if all of these photo apps now want every day to be like an anniversary or a birthday. Every day becomes a significant day. So insofar as every experience a photograph, as Sontag says, becomes flattened. Everyone who's. Who's photographed is a celebrity and therefore everyone is a celebrity and therefore nobody's a celebrity. This tying it to a date so that you might be, you know, 50 years ago. You might be photographed every, every year on your birthday and every year at school picture day or something like that. And other than that, maybe you don't have. And graduation, maybe you don't have very many everyday photos of your life now. It's as though every day of the year is some kind of big event. And if you don't have a photograph from that specific date, there's this black hole in your photographic record. The attempt to capture everything in your life and therefore give meaning to every moment of your life. And obviously the flip side of that is taking away meaning in every moment of your life. That creep, it just seems to get more and more like, I wonder what the next step is beyond that. Once, once every day has become an anniversary, you know, is it going to show you what you were doing hour by hour, minute by minute, where you were what. When you go places, will it ping on your phone? Your past photographs from that particular street corner, Starbucks, hotel, me get pen, I 7:42 Wes: need to write these ideas down, because I can get AI to Vibe code this for me. 7:49 Erin: I don't know what the point of any of this is, just that, yeah, I was really interested in this idea of an imperializing democracy that Sontag pinpoints. And that's kind of the. Where I wanted to begin. But I'm going about it in a very weird way. 8:03 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. A kind of leveling that between experiences that becomes overpowering or subjects us. Is that the idea? 8:12 Erin: Yeah. She makes the point very subtly. She says on page seven, this is in Plato's cave. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning, to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. It's a bit of a stretch, but I just noted the proximity in the paragraph. I mean, they're a sentence apart from each other. Imperial and democratize. So the sense that it's a. It's that photography is attempting to colonize the whole world. But what it's doing really is setting up the pseudo world of images which stands in parallel to the actual world. Everything in the world is captured in individual photographs. So everything is atomized, it's democratized because anything photographed becomes equivalent to anything else that is photographed. And then there's also this democracy where we're all imperial rulers over. Over the image world that we've constructed in our own heads that gives us the impression that we own it or that we understand it or that we can see it and kind of map it in our own heads, whether we've been to these places or not. And that that's somehow given to everybody. So we're all emperors over our own internal image worlds. And the equality of that is the democratic part, I suppose. I think something like really complex is happening in the. In her use of those two terms side by side. 9:51 Wes: Right. There's a sense in which photographs become an aid to memory. And they can also become a replacement for memory. And that's part of the problem. So the minute that you're taking a snapshot of something on a vacation, it takes you out of the experience because, again, it gives you the sense that you've acquired it. And I've put it in my little box. My little. It's like taking a note now. I don't have to, really. If I don't have to rely on memory, then why let myself be as immersed in the experience as I might otherwise? Let myself be. Because that's on the record. Something like that. But here, at the point that you were quoting her, she had just talked about how despite the fact that photographs are used as evidence and they can incriminate and they can justify and they suggest that something exists, there's always the selection. Selection becomes a kind of interpretation. We decide what we're going to photograph and when we're going to photograph them and how. And eventually, as we get into the other essay, how people are going to pose and all of that stuff. So she mentions taking shots of sharecroppers in a way that'll express their poverty and dignity, for instance. But the other aspect here, I think that you're getting at is the kind of aggression that's paradoxically involved in passivity and ubiquity. So maybe just to read. We'll give people an idea, since she's such a fabulous essayist. I'll just read it. Images which idealize, like most fashion and animal photography, are no less aggressive than work, which makes a virtue of plainness. Like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort and mugshots, there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as it is in all the succeeding decades during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Juliet Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron, who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. I think you already read this. Right from its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent photography in photography from its very beginning. To democratize all experiences by translating them into images. So it's there. Interestingly, the kind of thing that the advance of technology makes possible, I think she thinks is already there from the very beginning, this democratization of experience. But it really accelerates it. And then we get into the ubiquity of it with everyone has a pocket camera, and little did she know that real it would all just be in the phone. You'd sound like a crazy person if you said that around this time. And everyone would just have phones in their pockets that were also cameras. 13:04 Erin: I guess another way of putting this is to say that photography is an aggressive imperialistic enforcement of a democratic relationship to the world, which is to say a sort of enforced equality or flattening. That paragraph, I think, is the most interesting in an essay full of just the most brilliant paragraphs. 13:27 Wes: Agreed. 13:28 Erin: In response to what you said about. About photographs becoming a replacement of memory, I think that's absolutely true, and I think that's even more true now. I mean, I think it's true in a way that Sontag never could have anticipated. I mean, she's. She's already sort of hinting at it, of course, But I do think that there's something almost quaint now, or in fact, quite quaint about actual physical photo albums. She talks about the elegiac quality of photos and photos being a memento mori, which I think is a little bit different from being an aide to memory. You know, so you look back through a photo album and it might trigger a memory of a certain day or even how you were feeling in that moment, but really, it seems designed for pathos. And as she talks about capturing somebody at a moment which is now past or now dead or an earlier version of that person. Right. And I think now what we have is maybe rather than walking around with these image worlds in our head, these facsimiles of the world in our head, as she's suggesting, photographs supply us with. Really, we're walking around with these facsimiles of the world in our phones, and we've exported this external hard drive. We've exported all of our memories to this object as well, so that we don't have to hold onto the memories in our heads, even in the way that Sontag is describing in the essay. You know, we've sort of gone beyond this and all of our function when it comes to recalling something. Like, it could be triggered by seeing photos in the phone. But primarily we're exporting that memory to the phone, and it's containing much vaster quantities of photos than an album could hold. So it does become like memory, like an external hard drive for our memories. 15:17 Wes: Because of that, we sort of interfere with memory. I think part of the thing is memory implies loss, right? Because the thing is no longer around and because the memory of it is going to fade. And because a memory is more than the visual experience, right? There's also the emotions involved. And you're on a family trip and people are annoying you and maybe you're bored or have to go to the bathroom. There's a lot of other stuff outside of the picture of you looking happy in front of the mountain or whatever it is. So there is a kind of manic quality, or what I would call a manic defense quality to photography. Naturally, it's a defense against loss with actual memory. Loss is just a part of it. And that's kind of the way she begins her book, right. Talking about how photography redefines our relationship to the real world in these very. In terms of acquisition, we have the photographs on our external hard drive, on our phone. It's like appropriation, the idea that for some societies, being photographed might steal one's soul. Well, I kind of think we act as if we're sucking the soul of the world into the phone or into the camera to keep it with us. And then, of course, we can manipulate. I mean, she talks about blowing up and retouching photographs, you know, and we don't even. We don't even do that anymore, but we can put them into digital folders or put them on social media and do all sorts of other virtual types of manipulation with them. And since the time when she wrote this essay, that the ability to share these photographs, that was enhanced incredibly by social media and Facebook and things like that. And it used to be fun. Facebook used to be fun. I don't know if people remember that now. It's just something that I. And most people I know just avoid unless they have to do something on it for some reason. And why is that? I don't know exactly beyond politics or beyond envy of seeing people live their shiny lives on Facebook with the vacations. I don't know what it is, but it became. Something went sour with that. And part of it, I guess, is just the getting sucked into this activity of putting one's life on blast or advertising your life to other people and trying to get them to see you and them trying to get you to see them. I don't know what it is, but anyway, I kind of digress there. Really what I was trying to get at was the manic quality of this and the idea that there's some kind of power and control and acquisition in taking photos. And even the fact that you can kind of make time stand still, as she points out. You just get a slice of time. There's an element of incredible power in 18:21 Erin: all that, I guess, to go into the personal for a second. I sometimes forget to take photographs and wish that I had taken them. But also, I think I sometimes don't take. Want to get out the phone and start taking photographs, because for me, I've always been dissatisfied by the photos that I take because I feel as though they never really capture what I'm seeing, right. Like, I guess I'm just not a good enough photographer where I feel as though anytime I capture something and then I look at it in the phone, I'm like, oh, well, that's not really what it. 18:52 Wes: You gotta put it in portrait. Portrait mode. 18:54 Erin: Gotta put it. I know you taught me that, 18:58 Wes: but I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, I know. I, That's. And that's part of my reluctance. I just know it looks so plain in the photograph, but it's so amazing, you know? 19:08 Erin: Exactly, exactly. And so then what I do is I take 45 photos of the exact same thing at slightly different tilts and then I. 19:17 Wes: You're playing paying for the cloud storage now. 19:19 Erin: Exactly. Well, no. And so then I. Well, so I have, I guess, many, many thousands fewer images than all of my friends, I think. Because then what I do is I, I don't want to take the photos because then I have to go in and choose which of the 45 I'm going to save for posterity. And I'm clicking back and forth between the one image and then the next image one inch to the left and the next image one inch to the left of that, you know, and, and so I, I think part of it is I don't take the photo because I don't want to put myself through that because I then have to edit everything and get down to the one image because I'm going, okay, I can't have 45 images of the same thing. I just have to choose. And usually it's a very arbitrary. And just say, okay, fine, this one, you know, but none of them satisfies me. None of them ever seems to me a good encapsulation of the moment. It doesn't capture the beauty, it doesn't capture the whatever. And that's simply because, you know, as she points out in the essay, it's just a slice. It's just, you know, the frame. What's being cut out really severely limits what the photograph can capture. And what. I mean, they're really. Photos are really unrealistic. It's stupid to maybe to point out something so obvious, but they're so limited and they're so unrealistic. Not only are they playing with scale as she talks about, but they're cutting out so much of what was live and real and, you know, obviously 3D and in the round about the experience that I think of them as being. I mean, I'm so grateful to have the certain photos that I do of people and obviously having Baby photos of people or photos of loved ones who are. Who are now no longer with us is. You know, it seems like photography is an incredible gift, but also I've always had this really frustrated relationship to it, probably because I'm just not a very good photographer. And they seem like strangely bad approximations of the world that they're purporting to capture. Exactly. You know, I often think that light in a painting is a much, much better illustration of light. 21:23 Wes: Yeah. They can convey the power of the scene more accurately, in a sense, bring some of the emotion. I mean, a good photograph can do some of that. But. Yeah, in general, with our snapshots, it's not going to happen as well. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. So she points to this. Most photography has nothing to do with art, and it does serve this function, according to the Sontag, of memorializing family life, for instance, including weddings. It's a very important part of big events and tourism, as we've talked about. And I think the thing that she highlights is that as the society becomes more atomized and there's more industrialization and people can travel more, this becomes a kind of desperate way to deal with that fact as community fades, as communal ties are less strong, and you begin replacing that with this kind of ritual of. Of picture taking for families. But it's not going to replace the ties that are being lost. 22:24 Erin: Yeah. That idea that photos are a kind of prosthesis of the larger family that's been lost in the reduction to the nuclear family that oftentimes all we have of those extended relations are photographs of those family members rather than those people living in the house. Say, if we were in a two or three family home or something like that. 22:46 Wes: I love this idea, too, that on vacation we might feel guilty about not being at work. Right. It gives us something to do. We have a job now. We're a photographer while we're on vacation. 22:59 Erin: Right. 23:00 Wes: But it's a way of, you know, in general of, you know, she says, refusing experience or damping down experience by using the camera, putting the camera between yourself and the experience to deal with the anxiety of that. But that includes the guilt. So she says a way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it. By limiting experience to a search for the photogenic. By converting experience into an image, a super souvenir assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter this Gives shapes to experience, stop, take a photograph and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic. Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working. When they're on vacation and supposed to be having fun, they have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work. They can take pictures. I think that's very, very true. 24:03 Erin: It is. 24:04 Wes: It's hard just to stop and experience, you know, just the pause. 24:08 Erin: Yeah. I think of my grandfather when I read that, who. His photos are all over this. I'm in my grandmother's house right now. His photos are all over the walls of the house from all their many, many travels all over the world. And he was someone who retired very young, but he had this. He was never fully resting. You know, he was retired. But there was always something to do. You know, there was always work in the garden to do. There was always cooking and shopping to do and things to fix. You know, he had had his workbench downstairs and would always. I never knew what he was doing, but he was always hammering at something or putting things together. And. And so I think that that must have been, you know, the picture taking must have been a kind of version of this. You know, he's on vacation, but he still has a job to do. And there are actually pictures of him with multiple cameras around his neck for different. You know, he would have like the video camera and the different lenses and was really into that and got into that actually, when he was in the army. So I also have all of these photos of his several albums of Munich in 1945 and different buildings, which. I've always wanted to go to Germany and see if I could find the buildings that he was in. And which I have, you know, so detailed are the records that he took pictures, for instance, of street signs so you could locate the exact corner, you know, that the building was on. 25:25 Wes: Wow. 25:26 Erin: Yeah. It strikes me now is that he might have been sort of an anxious person, since a lot of this is also supposedly a defense against anxiety, which I think is. Which I think is right, too. I made a list of, across the two essays of the three sets of moral relationships and how Sontag characterizes them. The relationship between the photographer and the camera is one moral relationship that she describes which has many different characteristics. Each of these does the relationship between the photographer and the thing photograph the subject and then the relationship between people and the photographic images that they view. So the viewer and the image, all of the things that we've talked about so far, primarily that between photographer and camera. So as you described, the appearance of participation without participation, the refusal of experience, putting the camera between the self and the event to soothe, as a defense against anxiety, to relieve disorientation, the work like activity. And then we get into a couple of things that have much deeper moral implications. So the camera as a kind of a gun, as something automated, requiring no skill or expert knowledge, as she points out. And then also the camera as a passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions. And some of this shades into the relationship between the photographer and the photographed. But the idea that one is freed from responsibility towards those things or people or events which are photographed, that that implies a certain lack of intervention and maybe even this implicit approbation. You're saying when you take a photograph of something that you want it to keep going, which I thought was one of the most interesting elements, that. That it's encouraging something to keep happening in an implicit way. But then also there's this distance that's required. If you're going to take a photo of something, you need to be at least a little bit distant from it in order to capture it. Right. You can't be in the middle of the action. You can't be participating in something fully if you're taking a photograph of it. And you need a little bit of physical distance in order to capture something with a lens. That dichotomy is something we might dig into a little bit more. 27:30 Wes: Yeah. She makes this transition in the essay from the right. The idea that photography seems like an act of non intervention. But if you think about what's happening in say, war photography, to maintain one's position as a photojournalist, one can't get involved. I assume a war photographer would try to save someone's life if they're bleeding out in front of them. But they're certainly not picking up a gun to get involved in the fight. So she makes the point that it is. So it is still a form of participation in the sense it's a complicity with whatever makes something interesting. I think that's what you're getting at with you sort of encouraging something to keep happening by treating it as interesting. Yeah. And then I like this metaphor of the gun because there's something. I mean, she compares it to. She says that there's something perverse about picture taking. Right. And quotes Diane Arbus is saying it's a naughty thing to do, so it can intrude, it can obviously be exploitative and the fact that they're so automated increases this problem. And I was thinking, as you talked about your grandfather, there's a time when actually there's some skill and effort actually still involved. I mean, she thinks what's going on is automated, but the fact that we can just take out our phones and do it, and the phone does practically everything for you, including all these effects, and cheapens it in a way. There's an important relationship between the automation of the machine that you're using and then the target. So with a gun, right, you know, machine gun life becomes even cheaper by virtue of the fact that it's so easy to expel bullets and take out so many people at once. And likewise, people seem more possessable to the extent that you can easily take pictures of them. Right. In a way, it changes our relationship to others. She talks about it as becoming a way of turning them symbolically into objects that we possess. She says to photograph people is to violate them by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have. It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed, just as the camera is. A sublimation of the gun to photograph someone is a sublimated murder, a soft murder, appropriate to sad, frightened time. Really great. 30:00 Erin: Yeah. Well, insofar as you're suggesting, and I think really accurately so that the iPhone is now more like the machine gun, I'm wondering if this idea of the photo seeing people as they never see themselves and therefore this being akin to sublimated murder, as she calls it, if the ubiquity of this kind of murder is therefore making people more impervious, or somehow people are getting acclimated to being murdered in this way. Do you know what I mean? Like people now are taking so many selfies, for instance. I mean, the selfie is. Is one thing we might really talk about this new innovation, which is of course not in the Sontag, but if we've now become akin to self murderers or if we have become impervious to this kind of murder because we're seeing ourselves as an outsider all the time. Right? That's really what that is, right? This idea that we're in a sense trapped inside our own bodies, which when I think about it too hard or for too long, I start to feel very claustrophobic that we're never going to see ourselves except through some apparatus outside of us, a mirror or reflection in some other surface or a photo. Therefore, people walking around have an access to us just through their own vision of us, which we can never have of ourselves. And the photograph, as you're saying, and as Sontag says, possesses us in that way so that the photographer bags us like they would game or something like that. But now that we could flip it around, now that we have these phones that have that function where we can view ourselves through that lens pretty regularly, and now that people take, especially like teenagers take photographs of themselves all day long. Yeah. Is that equivalent to a kind of suicide? Is that where Sontag would go with the iPhone? Or would she simply say that people have now become impervious to this kind of murder? Or both? I don't know. You know, these teens, suddenly everyone knows what their best angles are, how to perfectly capture, you know what I mean? Like, they're very savvy about this. 32:09 Wes: Yeah, you got to do. You got to do the duck. The duck lips, apparently. I don't know why people think that helps. 32:16 Erin: It used to take an entire studio system of experts in different areas of, you know, image consulting and curation to help movie stars become the best versions of themselves. And even those movie stars often were not self aware enough to know what was being captured. And now it seems everyone is their own image consultant. And this kind of knowledge is very, very opaque to me. So it's, it's shocking that somebody could apparently successfully do this. To know themselves so well from the outside and to get that kind of distance from the self. It's very eerie to me. 32:51 Wes: Yeah. I'm thinking about this idea that when she says it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed and that's a kind of sublimated murder, that people are very comfortable with doing this with themselves. Right. Symbolically possessing themselves with these selfies and the sense in which that is a kind of murder. And of course, anything that puts us into the realm of the image and the imaginary, I think it subtracts from life, you know, in ways that we've. We've talked about before because it takes us outside of the immediate experience, but it is also just concerned with one aspect of the experience, which is the visual. So we're not even worried in that moment, you know, as we haven't. We're like. It's as if we have an image consultant. But we're not worried about our character, for instance. We're just worried about how we look in a particular moment in time in an image. And so we're imagining the other. We're more strongly oriented to the other on a specific axis of the. Involving the image. Right. So there's a lot of Ways to be caught up in how others see us or in the field of recognition that others supply. But how one looks, of course, is just a very, very thin part of that. And to be oriented towards that, I think, is part of this murder and involved with cameras. 34:15 Erin: Oh, I see, yeah. So you're reducing the self, or you're killing off several layers of self in fantasy. 34:23 Wes: Right, yeah. There's benefits to that, because if the image is just a signifier for all the rest of it, well, that's a very controllable thing in the moment. You just have to be able to pose correctly, and then it's not actually about who you are or even how you were feeling at that particular moment. Why not? If you're feeling sad at the tourist site, why not take a picture of yourself looking sad and remember that actual feeling? That's the part of the memory that is apt to get erased by the attempt at being an image consultant to oneself. But she does talk about how the gun replacement thing, and she talks about this with safaris. Right. It's an interesting example. So guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it has always been, what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered mortal needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot, but when we are nostalgic, we take pictures. And so this is a segue into the idea that photography is an instrument of nostalgia. There's a touch of pathos. You can do it even with a grotesque subject. There's something that photography does to dignify the subject and participate in people's mortality, because the subject is going to pass away. So whatever you've preserved. So this runs cross current, I think, to what she's been saying, which is that this preserving quality to photographs highlights, by contrast, the mortality and temporality and temporariness of the objects or subjects that it's recording. My photos are going to live forever in the cloud, but not me. It's not fair. 36:18 Erin: Right, right. Well, once we can upload your consciousness to the cloud, then it'll all be shortly. 36:24 Wes: Soon. 36:24 Erin: Yeah. Then you'll be a collection of photos with a curating consciousness, which. Which is, I think, a little bit of what she's getting at here, but I don't want to get ahead of myself, but the idea that something about the preservation with the camera highlights the temporariness of the thing being photographed, as you put it. This is where things get kind of interestingly tricky. I'm pulling partly from The Arbus essay. This idea of the camera as a passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions. I think Sontag would argue that we need to know what we're taking in a photograph, say of a panda, that pandas are endangered, for that photograph to have some kind of moral purchase. Right. She's going to describe the narrativizing or the contextualizing need for photographs to really explain anything or to have any kind 37:20 Wes: of weight, ethical or political effect. 37:23 Erin: Right, right. It's as though the default mode of the camera is one which is anti moral. And to be put to a moral use. Photos need historical context and an overriding narrative for which they would then come in as secondary items to just furnish evidence toward an already established moral framework or position. So when we have a camera and we're taking photos of something like say we are war photographers and we're photographing people dying in front of us, something about having a camera in that moment, she would argue, justifies that position. You know, it's okay for us to be there watching people die in front of us because we're recording it. So I think this is what she talks about with the camera being a passport. And there's no moral boundary. You know, the moral boundary that might be there that might make us say, turn away from that moment is evaporated because we're a war photographer and that's what we're there to do is photograph people dying, say. So it seems almost anti moral or outside of morality entirely to be walking around with a camera. Or it may even be pro immorality. Like if we're, if we're, if we're taking a photograph of someone doing something which we might deem immoral. She says that the relationship of the person with the camera to the thing that they are photographing is one of encouragement. So the person might even be encouraged to keep going because they see that they're being photographed. And if we're going to contrast that with this idea of the preservation of nature or something which has maybe a moral weight attached to it, or a photograph which we want to serve a moral end, like showing a part of the Amazon rainforest which has been cut down, you know, taking pictures of the stumps of trees to serve a moral point, we would need a larger apparatus of narrative to even understand why that photo might be moral. I mean, maybe I'm arguing against myself because when I see that, I might be sad just seeing trees cut down. But I think Sontag would argue that one would need to have it explained to them that the Amazon is being cut down because people are, you know, whatever, building McDonald's and need. Need trees cut down in the Amazon to furnish the wood to build those McDonald's. And this is a bad thing, and here's evidence of it. And then you see the image of the Amazon cut down and you're filled with moral indignation at this image. In other words, there's a default amoral or immoral position that the camera typically has. And when put toward some kind of end, which is supposed to be propagandistic or moralistic in a sort of positive way, it needs a lot of extra help to get somebody there, to get them to a moral position, which we would consider to be on the plus side of that equation. 40:23 Wes: Yeah, you're getting at the point that she makes about the use of photographs in service of conscience and in service of political and moral feeling. And she makes this interesting point that it's different for conscience than it is for desire. So in a way, desire is ahistorical. You just need certain archetypes, like if you want to induce sexual lust, you just. There's pictures of bodies. But if you want to arouse moral feelings and historical context is very important, if you want to awaken conscience, you need a given historical situation, and the context around that has to be clear. So she brings up, for instance, the example of Civil War battlefield photographs. Not dampening enthusiasm for the war, for instance. You're not going to just produce the feeling of revulsion for the war with a photograph. There's not already the seed of that revulsion already there. Or for instance, photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one and help build up a nascent one. And so she brings up, of course, that famous picture of the Vietnamese child who's just been napalmed, that iconic picture. And that did a lot right to increase revulsion against the Vietnam War. But by contrast, the Korean. Well, actually, I think the point she makes about the Korean War was that there was no photographic record or not much. And there wasn't because the ideology did not allow that right. There was no space for that because of a pre existing ideology. So if we want to produce photographic evidence, we're doing that in the context of an ideology or in the context of a naming of an event or the context of an existing political consciousness. We're not just going to invent a political consciousness whole cloth by use of photographs. And then she goes on to talk about her own personal experience seeing Holocaust photographs and how important that was to her and life changing. I mean, that was for me, actually, as a kid too. She says it divided her life into two parts and I kind of felt the same way. But the overall point, despite that example, is that it doesn't. Right. These photographs aren't necessarily going to strengthen conscience. They can also corrupt it, anesthetize it. Because through such photographs we get this repeated exposure, we get inured, we get used to atrocities and seeing things that might have once have shocked us. The shock kind of fades. So it's really a double edged sword. She says it can deaden the conscience as much as arouse it. 43:11 Erin: She talks about the omnipresence of photographs having an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility, how we can be inured to those images. And we'll wrap up here, but in the next part, maybe we can begin by talking about what she might be implying about an ethical comportment towards photographs. Like she calls photographs themselves an ethics of seeing. They're furnishing an ethics of seeing. And I'm wondering if she is implicitly pushing back against that or showing us maybe some ways to think about how we might push back against the perhaps too transgressive mode of seeing which photographs are furnishing us with. So maybe we can dive into that at the beginning of part two. All right, thanks, Wes. 43:56 Wes: Thank you.