Hello and welcome to the 42nd issue of Place! This week, Place editor Kylee is reading Susan Sontag and thinking about the photographs we take of the places around us, why we take them, and what lives these images live long after we capture them. What are the visions you cherish around you, how do you frame them, and to what ends? Read on to get Kylee’s take, and leave your own comments at the bottom of this post to tell us yours.
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The first time I remember imaging a place I had never been to, was in looking at a photograph. My parents had a slide projector that they would bring out on weekend evenings in the cold Canadian winter. We would set it up in our unfinished basement, turn off the lights, and let the images dance on the bare drywall.
I loved all of the old photos my parents chose to go through, but one of my favourite slide decks was of my mom’s trip to Tanzania and Kenya when she was about the age I am now. Armed with my Dad’s canon AE-1 Canon 35mm film camera and a tripod, she periodically captured the scenes that she saw on her month-long trip. I sat bewildered on our old beige fabric couch, seeing saturated pictures of elephants, Ngorongoro crater and Mount Kilimanjaro flash across the wall in front of me.
My mom surely provided context for me and my sister as we looked at the images, but it's not her explanations of the pictures that stay cemented in my mind, only the pictures themselves. To borrow celebrated American author and reporter Walter Lippman’s oft-recollected observation, “photographs have a kind of authority over the imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word had before that. They seem utterly real.”
In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag builds on the arguments she puts forward in her first collection of essays about picture-taking, On Photography. While the volume is primarily concerned with discussing images of war, the reflections that Sontag pens are relatable to anyone who’s ever been moved by an image, or indeed, partook in creating one.
While Sontag’s writing spans countless diversions of thought on the subject, one aspect of photography that she discusses -- both its motive and its implications -- is its role in our memories, the personal and public. “When it comes to remembering the photograph has a deeper bite,” she writes.
Aside from some form of creative expression, I’m acutely aware that one of the major reasons I myself take photographs of the places around me is to remember them. Indeed, Sontag reaffirms that the two basic motivations of photography are to “generate documents or create visual works of art.” I have always had a fear of forgetting - taking pictures is a hedge to ensure that at least in some form of a freeze frame, I can remember where I’ve been, with who, and at what time.
But I wonder if this is where it ends - if I could be so moved by pictures my mother took of a place I haven’t even been, are the pictures I take really just for myself and my own memories? If not, who are they for, and what about the places or moments that I capture will be conveyed?
Sontag notes that photographs, particularly those used in news reporting are “prized as transparent accounts of reality,” but that despite this common designation, they should not be considered so lightly. “The photographic image...cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.”
In the great age of the democratisation of photography, in a time when everyone has a camera in their pockets and where the majority of us connect with each other via social media platforms geared specifically towards the reproduction of images, we are all acutely aware of the so-called ‘highlight reel’ that collated pictures can create.
The places that we inhabit or visit, have become a large part of this form of communicating with one another. We interpret the lives of those around us from the images they share with us, and we participate in this story-telling ourselves with each click of a button.
In this way, photographs become “objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy of transcription of an actual moment of reality, and an interpretation of that reality,” writes Sontag. What I take from Sontag here, is that even if our intention to photographing the places that surround is motivated by something as seemingly simple as documentation, the images we make live beyond their capture, taking on new forms with each new viewing, not only by our older selves, but by those we share them with.
To illustrate, Sontag puts forward an example: David Seymour’s photo entitled ‘Land Distribution Meeting, Extremadura, Spain, 1936,’ depicts a woman on the edge of a crowd holding a baby looking attentively up at the sky. In retrospect of knowing what would soon happen in Spain, the carnage of the Spanish civil war, Sontag explains that in public memory, the photograph is often incorrectly recalled as an image of a group of people anxiously scanning the sky for attacking planes. As time passes, distinct days and months, which could have marked the end of life, of dire turning points for the subjects in the image, conflate to a single moment in our collective viewership. We time travel, and take from the photo what we want to take from it. Context evaporates, and we let our imaginations take over. Memory, and myth, is born.
I’m currently in Rome, and last weekend I walked up to the top of Palatine hill. On the way, I stopped to take a photo of the facade of a church in the late light of day. A cat snuck by me on the near empty pathway and across the ruins of the Roman Forum, the white columns of the Altar of the Fatherland stood stark in the evening sun. At first, I thought nothing of the image I was framing. But after looking back at it through the display screen, I realised I had taken that exact same picture before.
Seven years ago in Rome, I had snapped the cross atop the church with my iPhone and posted it to Instagram, without a relevant caption describing the location. Later on when I scrolled through my feed and saw the photo, I became sure that I had taken the picture in Israel. At one point, I may have even shown it to someone, explaining it as a memento from my trip to Jerusalem.
The irony of the situation is palpable. In an attempt to document a moment in a place, I had instead created a myth.
Reading Sontag, I realised that our intentions behind photographing the places around us, whether or not we are aware of them in the moment, do not corral the life of an image we capture. It will be reinterpreted, not only by ourselves, but by our families or even the public, if we choose to release it to such audiences.
Through photographs we legitimise, we tell stories, we create visions. And while the abstracted nature of photography is unavoidable, there is an opportunity to choose what visions we will cherish, pass on and create myths around. Interpretations can short-change the subject of an image, but they can also inspire dreams.
Those winter nights in the basement of my childhood home looking at the slides of unknown places have most likely played a large role in shaping the vagrant-y life I’ve lived since, an effect that surely wasn’t my mom’s intention when she took those pictures. A very real impact of an imagined world, created by the click of a button.
- Kylee Pedersen is a writer and editor usually based in London, UK. She writes about travel, food, and the natural world, among other things.
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Join us next week for another journey.
Beautiful. I, too, imagine my images to capture still sentiments. As if a photograph can hold an essence, or how the going about of a day made me feel, or how it felt to finally arrive at a sought after destination.
I wonder if myth or legend transpires more or less from still, purposeful images of crosses in Rome (or Jerusalem) or from accidental, quick snap shots of hair across ones face in front of a cafe chair in a garden. Is the myth born because the photo lacks remembrance, and when the photo holds enough substance entirely the true nature of the context of the image is held more in tact?
Lovely thoughts Ky. Thank you.