alterations

In the essay “In Pluto’s Cave” by Susan Sontag, she expresses her view photography in a unique and mesmerizing way. A passage I find interesting is:

“Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed, and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; published compile them.”

She states how photography is transformed and used in everyday life. Photos often end up in magazines or in photo albums. She states that the pictures are “stuck” making them seem as if they are forced and have no freedom. They are commonly altered and distorted from what they originally were. The technology today with picture workshops and being able to airbrush and change photos has really influenced photography. Sontag shows photography in a negative way, showing the beauty being taken away from it. These pictures can be anything from beautiful to horrifying. Some pictures remind us too much of suffering and began to numb our feelings. They want news to be heart wrenching so they add disturbing photos that stick in your mind. It can also be used for amusement by simply taking photos of your friends or a party you were at last weekend. These experiences become images that we can remember forever. She words it as being souvenirs of our daily life.

Just by reading this passage, she overlooks the positivity of photography. She makes it sounds trapped and warped when the only photos that are retouched are the ones shown on the media. Most of us are aware that the media is filled with unreal beauty and lies. Real photography is the art of taking breathtaking photos of nature or simple innocence. The photos we take with our digital cameras and cellular forms are still images of a memory of an event. It helps us retain experiences that we cannot always remember in our head. Special events such as birthday or our wedding day is a memory we want to hold on to forever. They are stuck in albums and framed because it is something we want to keep safe and have for a lifetime. Some photos are passed on from generations of our grandparents and great grandparents. This is something that resembles our family history and our way of life. I demonstrated the strategy of arguing the other side because I feel Sontag speaks of only the negative side of photos in this passage when really it is a small percentage. The media distorts images because they like the change the image of reality; something we know can never be altered.