Essay Questions

How did Susan Sontag discuss some of the problems of photographed images in her culture?

Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ started with a single essay wherein Susan Sontag needed to investigate a portion of the issues, both aesthetic and moral, displayed by the ubiquity of photographed images in her culture. As the essay turned out to be increasingly perplexing and verifiably broad, it proposed others, and more than five years Sontag in the long run composed a series of essays in which she followed the customs and significance of photography. As she later was to write, the contention outlined in the first essay developed full circle through diversions and documentation into the more hypothetical last essay, where the assortment finished.

Accordingly, Sontag—alongside such other literary culture critics as John Berger, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan—rewrite the manners by which individuals see the job of photography in present day society. The expression " modernism” meant for Susan Sontag is that with its ahistorical inclinations, has twisted and masked both the social uses and the idea of photography, darkening from the photographer and viewer alike the propagandistic and exploitative nature of the medium, particularly under capitalism.

Sontag has constantly characterized social analysis as a functioning, not a detached, occupation. Her job in essays, for example, those contained in On Photography is to assess the place of the medium in the human experience and, during the time spent talking about that place, to clarify the impact of photography and the photo, clarifying those components of the medium that have generally been occupied by formalist/aesthetic methodologies.

How does Susan Sontag make use of some quotes in the end of ‘On photography’ to describe women’s social position in the modern world?

In the anthology section that completes her book, Sontag has included two quotes that summarize the opposing idea of the manner by which people have pondered the photographic image. Writer Franz Kafka in discussion is cited “Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling…. This automatic camera doesn’t multiply men’s eyes but only gives a fantastically simplified fly’s eye view.” — From Gustav Jan ouch’s Conversations with Kafka as griping, that Photography focuses on the shallow and that it clouds the shrouded life, giving not a progressively intense method for seeing but instead an excessively disentangled one.

Meanwhile, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer quote “That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous…. Photography…offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity” explains that since the external appearance is the image of the internal, the demeanor of the face uncovers the entire character. These quotes, similar to the book itself, has not made a specific reference to woman or women’s social situation in the modern world, but the whole of Sontag's perceptions do have direct application to women’s problems.

In the event that there is overpowering proof to recommend that women are characterized in some measure by the visual pictures of them—both still and moving—that are furnished by society, it is of some import that those pictures are not distinguishable from historical and cultural settings and, also, that the context changes through time. Such perceptions expel pictures of women from some kind of timeless classification of fixity and propose that what has been done can be fixed, or if nothing else made over, later on.

If women have been detained by the photographic pictures of the past, at that point the future holds open the likelihood that such keeping definitions can and even should be changed. In the event that photos, as other art objects, bear moral ramifications, at that point photographic pictures can be read in more dynamically ideological manners—ways that can recommend, for women's activists, a recovering of the historical past.

At last, if photos do not decide one's reading of them yet rather give a site to singular allotment, at that point they likewise will enable women to recover lost ideological ground, first taken from them by male-dominated thoughts of greatness in art (with its thoughts of intensity, control, and subservience).