Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  It was a powerful book: powerful enough to wreck Susan’s friendships with photographers like Peter Hujar and Irving Penn;1 powerful enough for a critic to make Susan sound like a highbrow counterpart of the Ku Klux Klan: “She doesn’t see Photograph as individual works of art in the same way that a bigot doesn’t think of blacks or Italians or Jews as individual people.”2 For others, another reviewer wrote, “it became, almost instantly, a bible.” Thirty years later, photographers still “ask themselves constantly why they are doing the work they do, and to whom they are doing it, and whether anyone cares whether they do it or not. If any one person provided the words for that self-questioning, it was Susan Sontag.”3

  * * *

  The reception reflects the author’s own ambivalence. Her longing to see correctly—the most insistent question in her work—struggled with her distrust of the inevitable distortions of metaphor and representation.

  On the one hand, her suspicion of photographers rings so loudly that it is not surprising that many were aghast. The iconophobia of the American secular puritan joined the distrust of graven images that marked “Jewish moral seriousness.” (“Yes, I am a Puritan,” she wrote in 1976. “Twice over—American and Jew.”)4 She cast a supercilious eye over “mere images of the truth.”5 Photograph were consumerist kitsch and tools of totalitarian surveillance and did “at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.” Cameras were “predatory weapons”6 and photographers were peeping toms, voyeurs, and psychopaths: “there is aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”7 This, just in the book’s first chapter.

  Twenty years before, in The Mind of the Moralist, she had noted that “the sheer fact of observing atomic phenomena changed their velocities, and therefore the relations observed.”8 Quantum mechanics went still further, positing objects that only began to exist once they were observed. For this cabalistic mystery, the camera offered a ready simile: its lens altered reality and created it, too. This way of looking—one that transforms and falsifies matter—is the basis for Sontag’s distrust of the camera, as for her distrust of metaphor. A photograph, after all, is a metaphor—one thing standing for another—and Susan had an instinctive aversion to metaphors.

  Somebody says: “The road is straight.” Okay, then: “The road is straight as a string.” There’s such a profound part of me that feels that “the road is straight” is all you need to say and all you should say.9

  But (“The very nature of thinking is but,” she said) that was not the whole story. As when she wrote that she was “strongly drawn to Camp, and just as strongly offended by it,” or that “I grew up trying both to see and not to see,” her relationship to photography was never a simple matter of love or hate. It was love and hate, in extreme measure, an electric charge that explains why people loved or hated—loved and hated—On Photography.

  That tension made the book exciting. If Styles of Radical Will is often impressive, it can hardly be called fun. On Photography is both. Sontag’s learning no longer threatens to squash the middlebrow reader confronting it. She wears her knowledge lightly, making her range and wit all the more astounding. With hundreds of examples, she illustrates the complicated relationship between a metaphor and the thing that it represents, perverts, distorts, and creates.

  For Susan, a degree of belief in the world’s unreality had been psychologically necessary. Viewed through a sophistic lens, this belief could even look convincing intellectually; but it was not satisfactory, because if the eye distorts, it nevertheless sees some actual thing. The dreamworld imagined in her novels and endorsed in her essays (“It’s very tiny—very tiny, content”) was the camp view, the Warhol view, that the world was made of surface and style. That was true, but only half true—drama, not tragedy. For if vision and metaphor and photography alter reality, they just as often reveal it.

  But Susan could not have appreciated this “tragedy” until, in her words, death started getting real. She had been fascinated by Hujar’s Photograph of the bodies in Palermo; and in Israel, when she photographed bodies, she saw for herself the actual rotting flesh behind the images. It turned out that these bodies lurked behind the entire enterprise. “Photography is the inventory of mortality,” she wrote.10

  * * *

  Inside On Photography is another of Sontag’s disguised self-portraits. The book originated with her visit, at the end of 1972, to one of the great blockbuster exhibitions of the era, the posthumous retrospective of Diane Arbus. Arbus had slashed her wrists and taken an overdose of barbiturates a year before, aged forty-eight. In the short interval between her death and the show at the Museum of Modern Art, she had become so famous that when the show opened people lined up for blocks. It attracted more visitors than any previous photography exhibition, so popular that by the time it finished touring North America—seven years later!—no fewer than seven million people had seen it.11

  Many were repeat visitors, and one was Susan Sontag.12 In 1965, Arbus photographed her and David twice. The first portrait shows them on a park bench, their noses nearly touching, so close together that they almost look like two halves of the same face: no picture conveys their symbiosis as well as this one. Arbus also produced another image with a very different mood, in which a depressed-looking Susan huddles against a nattily dressed David. He, too, looks uncomfortable, as if his mother’s sadness had rubbed off on him. Susan did not take to Arbus, and perhaps it is this distaste one senses in the portrait: it certainly comes through in her comments on Arbus, on the evidence of which she seems to have loathed her.13

  But Susan was also fascinated by her—and fascinated that people were fascinated by her. Part of the reason she kept going back, she said, was to see the audience, to eavesdrop on their comments.14 The people these people were looking at were not just any people, since the Arbus exhibition was—to borrow the title of Susan’s essay—a freak show. There was a “Jewish giant.” There were people with Down’s syndrome and people sporting facial tattoos. There was a boy playing with a toy hand grenade, men putting on makeup, and a woman swallowing a sword.

  The audience devoured what Sontag called these “assorted monsters and borderline cases” because they were trendily appropriate to the times:15

  The Arbus Photograph convey the anti-humanist message which people of good will in the 1970s are eager to be troubled by, just as they wished, in the 1950s, to be consoled and distracted by a sentimental humanism.16

  * * *

  As it happens, Susan had long been fascinated by freaks. They were one of the “three themes I have been following all my life.” And they appear often in her notebooks. In 1965, she noted her fascination with

  Disembowelment

  Stripping down

  Minimum conditions (from Robinson Crusoe to concentration camps)

  Silence, muteness

  My voyeuristic attraction to:

  Cripples (Trip to Lourdes—they arrive from Germany in sealed trains)

  Freaks

  Mutants

  . . .

  Compare [X] who discovered he liked to play a sadistic role in sex by noting that he liked the same things—looking in medical books, at cripples, etc.

  Or is there something more? Such as:

  Identifying myself with the cripple?

  Testing myself to see if I flinch? (reacting against my mother’s squeamishness, as with food)

  A fascination with minimum conditions—obstacles, handicaps—of which the mutilated person is a metaphor?17

  In her essay on science fiction, she wrote that scientists were “always liable to crack up or go off the deep end” because they were a “species of intellectual.” She, too, belonged to that species, and part of her attraction to freaks was surely that she was one: beaten because she was a Jew, belittled because she was a woman, endangered because she was gay.

  In November 1972, as she was repeatedly attending the Arbus show, she wrote in her journals that her taste for freakishness was also intertwined with her interest in camp, a
nd that her essay on that subject had nearly become something else entirely. That other subject was morbidity, and it related to her discovery of homosexual taste in Paris. Camp, she had written, was “not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” And morbidity was not death but “death”—the aesthetics of death—just as pornography was not sex but the depiction of sex. None were the real world. They were the world as will—and representation.

  My original choice was “morbidity.” (From the neo-classical sculptures of Canova to the mummy art of the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo and Siracusa (Sicility) and Guanjuato (Mexico) [both, sic]. When that didn’t work, I turned to “camp.”

  To define the sensibility of Diane Arbus plunges me back into my original subject.

  Elliott Stein, eminence grise of many artists (me, Kenneth Anger)—underground cult founder of this taste: freaks, twins, Siamese twins, s-m, art nouveau, voodoo art, camp, baroque, Strauss operas, Damia & Frehel & Milly, Romaine Brooks, cancer exhibit in Medical Museum in London, Tod Browning movies, Zumbo effigies in Glore, “Symbolist” art (de Knopff) [sic], Times Square sex book shops, black magic, motorcycle cults, Justice weekly. Elliott’s room at the Hôtel Verneuil in Paris was the 1960s. You could come into his room in the late 1950s and see the 1960s, see the future. Like the “magic box.”18

  * * *

  “Photographing freaks ‘had a terrific excitement for me,’ Arbus explained. ‘I just used to adore them.’”19 The lines around the block testified that she was not alone. If Susan was also standing on that line, she also understood the obscenity of looking at what she saw as people displayed as freaks. And she was skeptical of the process that allowed viewers to see them—scrutinize them, study them, collect them, be shocked by them, mock them—without the slightest risk that they might return the favor. This voyeuristic aspect of photography connected it to sexual perversion, made it “an extremely private obsession (like the thing Lewis Carroll had for little girls or Diane Arbus had for the Halloween crowd).”20

  “You see someone on the street,” Arbus wrote, “and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.”21 This line, which Sontag quoted, makes Arbus seem mean. It also echoes what Susan’s colleague at the University of Connecticut said about her: “You had the sense that she was perpetually judging and perpetually judging unfavorably.” If Susan never enunciated this double identification—with the Halloween crowd as well as with the gawking culture-vultures—it lent On Photography the emotional color that hid behind Sontag’s best polemics. She was Arbus and freak, photographer and subject, judge and accused, executioner and victim. Her ambivalence meant that these writings were addressed in the first instance to herself, toward purging a part of herself she distrusted. It also meant that those who accused Sontag of hating photography were as wrong as those who thought she loved it. She felt as ambiguously about photography as she did about herself: the division she had described in 1960 between “I’m no good” and “I’m great.”

  “The subject of Arbus’s Photograph is, to borrow the stately Hegelian label, ‘the unhappy consciousness.’”22 This is exactly the subject of Sontag’s own work, though the subject of On Photography might equally be called the divided consciousness: between things and their representation, between a descriptive language and some “real” reality that consciousness fumbles around for but can never quite obtain. Sontag’s longing to grasp it partly explains her fascination with “the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood”: the camera, which packages reality into an easily accessible consumer good. The desire to “acquire” reality should not be reduced to consumerism, since for Sontag it went far deeper. But it is true that the camera allows people’s freakishness—their suffering—to be sliced up, placed on the wall, sold: transformed into a product.

  Yet showing the experiences of others is also a chance to understand them. “The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way.’”23 Any child knows that appearances can be deceptive, and that not all realities can be understood through images. Susan had been so horror-struck by the Holocaust pictures she had seen as a girl in Santa Monica that she could say the experience broke her life in two. But what did she really know of that suffering? Images that were too shocking—images taken at the edges of experience—could overwhelm and deaden the consciousness as much as they could awaken it. Perhaps that very anesthesia, Sontag wrote, was the reason people sought Photograph out.

  According to [Wilhelm] Reich, the masochist’s taste for pain does not spring from a love of pain but from the hope of procuring, by means of pain, a strong sensation. . . . But there is another explanation of why people seek pain, diametrically opposed to Reich’s, that also seems pertinent: that they seek it not to feel more but to feel less.24

  Art, for her, had been a means of increasing sensation: “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” Behind her attack on Arbus was a fear that this art would make her feel less, glossing over reality, aestheticizing it, reifying it: “To the painful nightmarish reality out there,” Sontag wrote, “Arbus applied such adjectives as ‘terrific,’ ‘interesting,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘fantastic,’ ‘sensational’—the childlike wonder of the pop mentality.”25 By bringing Warhol’s techniques to the carnival, Arbus was dulling the senses, Sontag thought. And because she saw Arbus’s subject as the pain of others, she feared that Arbus was eroding the moral imperative—itself ambiguous—to see the subject as more than its flaw. To see these pictures too often, to return to the freak show again and again, would make people feel less and less.

  * * *

  If the author’s ingenuity in hiding herself gives On Photography an immediacy her earlier books lacked, not even the most prophetic writer could have suspected that her own future was announced within it, and would come to surround the book, decades after its publication, with another, eerier, aura. After she died, Susan’s corpse became the locus of a sharp debate about what was appropriate, and what was obscene, in photography. The debate divided her friends and family. And it showed that the questions in On Photography were not only philosophical. They were ferociously emotional: matters, literally, of life and death.

  When Susan Sontag was dying, her partner, Annie Leibovitz, took a series of Photograph of her receiving chemotherapy, lying on hospital gurneys, twisting in agony, and then—bloated, scarred, completely unrecognizable—dead. The Photograph were published two years after Susan’s death in a book called A Photographer’s Life. In that book, Leibovitz interspersed professional Photograph, including images of politicians and celebrities, with Photograph from her personal life. She documented her pregnancy and the birth of her first child; and then of two almost simultaneous deaths: Susan’s, and then, a few weeks later, her father’s.

  For Leibovitz, it was a commemoration of life’s extremes—births and deaths—alongside the days in between. For others, it was a freak show. David Rieff was outraged that his mother was “humiliated posthumously by being ‘memorialized’ that way in those carnival images of celebrity death.”26 The word “carnival” recalled Susan’s own outrage at what she saw as Arbus’s exploitation of people who were no longer in control of their own images and could not give meaningful consent to their display and use. Leibovitz acknowledged the problem and its difficulties: “I think Susan would really be proud of those pictures—but she’s dead,” she said. “Now if she were alive, she would not want them published. It’s really a difference. It’s really strange.”27

  * * *

  Despite her professions of love for the medium, Sontag’s book became identified with a negative view of photography. “Many of her insights remain sharp and true,” wrote a later critic, Susie Linfield. “But it is Sontag, more than anyone else, who was responsible for establishing a tone of suspicion and distrust in photography criticism, and for teaching us that to be smart about Photograph means to disparage them.”28 One
rarely wonders whether book critics love literature, or whether music critics love music, but when writing about photography, “critics view emotional responses—if they have any—not as something to be experienced and understood but, rather, as an enemy to be vigilantly guarded against. . . . They approach photography—not particular Photograph, or particular photographers, or particular genres, but photography itself—with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear.”29

  Sontag often reacted coolly or dismissively in public to things that moved her a great deal in private; but it was the lack of a final conclusion that made the book so influential. Instead of a resounding, definitive-sounding statement (“Instead of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”), the book ends with an appendix of quotes. It is an appropriate conclusion for a book whose very quotability fueled controversy, since quotes, like Photograph, can be extracted and assembled, doctored and framed and plucked from their proper context, to support almost any argument. Photograph are quotations of time, instants that stand for some greater whole; and any critical description—built around quotations—inevitably omits certain arguments: akin, in that sense, to a book of Photograph. A quotation, like a photograph, is a fragment that suggests reality without being equivalent to it, and that is why photography

  has not, finally, been any more immune than painting has to the most characteristic modern doubts about any straightforward relation to reality—the inability to take for granted the world as observed.30

  The relation of photography to the world is marked by the same doubts that surround every interaction between metaphor and reality. Image and thing were neither completely distinct nor completely identical. Instead, their relationship evolved with history, one thing in nineteenth-century France—