Susan Sontags essay ‘Against Interpretation’ is a meditation on the division in the visual arts between form and content. Form being the surface qualities of the image, by content we mean the rationalisation we place on the image (Sontag’s essay is primary concerned with art... here I am just interested in the implications her ideas have towards the photographic). What Sontag’s tells us is that the images form has been over ridden by its content. That the content has overtaken form in emphasis and importance.
The idea of the image spit between not only form and content, but we could say between it mimetic qualities and it as a statement. Photography unlike the other visual arts is primarily concerned with the indexical, it referent, what object or series of objects we place in front of the camera. The photographic can never escape it own nature, and why would we want it to do anything else. Abstractions aside, even here we are dealing with the idea of ‘what is it’, we understand photographs as essentially reflecting something that either is or was. But photography as an art form has always fought against the indexical (in most cases, this is a generalisation, but I’m human so you’ll have to forgive me) nature of the photographic. Photographic movements have each in heir turn change the image into something that suits them... I’m thinking here of Margret Cameron, Steichen and other early art photographers. They tried to develop the other qualities of the photographic, symbolism, metaphor. As we moved along we see more movement interrupting the photograph, disrupting its power, dada etc. And we end up here the image have moved beyond the indexical... our stock of images is near complete, if you can’t get the image you want you can make the image you want. I’m not interested in the idea 0f the truth of the image just our faith in it, the faith that this was.
We’ll come back to this in a minute, firstly the importance of Sontag’s essay. Sontag tells us that:
‘Interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that. One tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.’
Sontag goes on to advocate anew vocabulary for talking about the image, one that emphasises form over the content. The notion of transparance , experiencing the ‘luminousness of the thing in itself’. That it radiates meaning from it surface, but not meaning, meaning is content, it radiates light. It traps light through a series of optic, and then it radiate that light back off the photographic surface. An everlasting single moment.
So what do I care? Photography and the photographic image are the strongest most directly involved aspects in this argument of Sontag’s with out her knowledge. The surface of the photographic, its form, is all there is, its form is its content. We can codify, we can unpack the image, and we can manipulate and make an argument for within the image. All we can do is reflect the light through a series of lens. We communicate through words and text better than images why want to tell some one something through a limiting medium as photography when you could just tell them what you think? We want to make image to communicate with each other, we're social being that why we do anything we do, but photography does something much more magical than that. It talks to us through its own surface, auteur or not, it speaks for it self and it ‘I was’. We should celebrate its inability to break free of its own indexicality; it is the one defining part that sets it apart from any preceding visual art form. Again it own form out ways any reading or notion of a statement that we place upon it, we can argue with it but we cannot disempower it. Any one who doesn’t believe this only has to see the importance of the role of the family album in any family, to see that we as people embrace the photograph as an affirmation of where we come from, who we were and how we will be remembered. We don't look for meaning in it, it makes us feel, it can make us mourn, it serves as a memory. These are the images that are unreadable to those outside of the family unit, those who see content in the images were there is only form.
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
Evergreen Review, 1964
