Omnipresence Of Truth In On Photography By Susan Sontag

Introduction

For my third year source review, and eventual progression to fourth year dissertation, my focus lies within the fine line between truth and manufactured reality in photography, and how artists and photographers question and challenge the assumption that photographs provide a truthful representation of what is before the lens.

It can be argued that there is no absolute in photography, but rather an agreed set of standards that constitute ‘manipulation’, determined by authority and the masses (manipulation in itself is hard to characterise as society often has a distorted understanding of it, therefor it can be redefined as intentionally misleading viewers, and/or misrepresenting subject matter). Vision is not a tangible thing

There is only honesty. As a photographer, you’re an artist, your photographs are an interpretation of the world. You have to get away from the idea that ‘this’ is the truth. (Huck Magazine,

Originally appearing as a series of individual writings between 1973 and 1977 in the New York Review of Books, it is often cited as writer, filmmaker and political activist Sontag’s best known work. Regarded as “the most original and important work yet written on the subject” (SFGate, 2018) by influential writer and art critic John Berger, I have selected this source as it is considered to be a groundbreaking critique of photography by academics and amateurs alike. Divided into seven chapters, one for each of the six essays and an additional brief anthology of photography related quotations, it is eloquently written and has a coherent structure which is easy to follow. She is successful in creating a tension between her disapproval of the medium, and her simultaneous excitement. Sontag has an exceptional ability to articulate approaches and theories that may otherwise have been difficult to word due to their visceral nature, perhaps as a result of the time in which it was written - when it was published by Penguin in 1977, it was the first of its kind. Whilst discussing the historical and present day implications of photography within society, Sontag makes reference to modern names of the time such as Walker Evans, Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon. She examines a large scope of issues within the topic, namely surrealism in