The publishing house Arcàdia has published two books of essays by American theorists, ‘On women’ and ‘On photography’. They are complementary to understanding his thinking.
Susan Sontag, feminist
“I have always been a feminist”, she answered in 1972 to one of the questions in the questionnaire that the editors of Librea publication in Spanish, they sent to six feminists, among whom there was also This sentence of Sontag is very relevant in that it erases all the doubts about that of the American theorist, doubts without basis but encouraged by Sontag’s non-inscription in radical feminism.
And it is true, Sontag was always critical of the political rhetoric of the feminist movement, which she called reductionist and accused of an excess of moralism: “What in the sixties was denounced as bourgeois, repressive and elitist, was also exposed as phallocratic. This type of militancy may seem to serve feminist goals in the short term, but it involves surrendering to childish notions of art and thought and instigating a moralism that is truly repressive”.
Her (critical) feminist consciousness and her theoretical, political and aesthetic interest in feminism, which were modulated over the years, took shape especially in the seventies: “What I have learned over the last five years – thanks also to the feminist movement – is to place my own experience under a certain political perspective. The good luck I may have had is not relevant here”, she stated in that questionnaire, where she criticized a feminism that often looked down on “other women less carried out”.
About women brings together texts and interviews published between 1972 and 1975, in which he resumes part of his reflections from Notes on camptext published in 1964. Yes camp it means opposing the role imposed on women through a “forceful, strident and vulgar parody”, the political power of feminism will lie not only in the disarticulation of the concepts that imprison women – beauty, youth, marriage, family… -, but also in the radical questioning of the concept of gender: “A society in which women are subjectively and objectively equal to men”, says Sontag, “must be by force an androgynous society”.
For Sontag, it is essential to ironize and question the genders, because it is the way to depolarize the man/woman dialectic, essential for the liberation of the demands linked to the gender role. And this liberation must occur in the workplace and family, but also in the body, a key battlefield. It is, on the one hand, the freedom to decide—abortion—and, on the other, the transgression against the stereotypes of beauty and youth imposed: “Women have an alternative. They can aspire to be wise and not just beautiful, to be competent and not just complacent, to be strong and not just delicate, to be ambitious for themselves and not only in relation to men and children. They can allow themselves to grow old in a way natural and unashamed, opposing and actively disobeying the conventions that come from this double standard that society establishes on aging”. The actuality and validity of Sontag’s feminist texts are as unquestionable as her Per Anna Maria Church
About women
Susan Sontag. Trad. Ariadne Pous
Arcadia
210 pages. 24 euros
The armed look
Between 1973 and 1977, the New York Review of Books published six short essays by Susan Sontag that addressed Rather than crafting a systematic study of her, these lucid and scathing pieces critically explored her nature and impact from moral, political, aesthetic, and cultural perspectives. And they did it at a time when photographs were beginning to saturate the world and serve, inexorably, the purposes of the new consumer culture. In 1977, these texts were collected in About photographyThe work, which has helped shape the way we understand the relationship between photographer, photographed object and viewer, becomes more relevant than ever in a time when the photographic image subjugates reality to impose its own regime.
Photographs, Sontag points out, provide a grammar and ethics of vision. Grammar, because they organize the look, they propose a visual vocabulary that structures perception. Ethics, because each photograph expresses a position regarding the world, transmits a way of looking and grasping, and influences the perception of those who watch it. The act of photographing is crossed by a poignant tension between observation and involvement: camera in hand, we become customers or tourists of reality. The photographic act is an act of non-intervention: while the photojournalist captures, he accepts the reality of what he sees without modifying it. This voyeuristic attitude reveals a humanistic suspicion; a critical awareness of how photography can distance us emotionally and morally from what we portray.
At the heart of the essay, the idea that photography does not represent or reproduce reality, but creates it (the camera is compared to a weapon that satisfies an acquisitive relationship with the world). He does this by generating images that decontextualize what is familiar towards unusual terrain, and by giving every moment the character of a mystery. This is how photography signifies and hierarchizes what we see, transforming it into an aesthetic and cultural object: “Any collection of photographs is an exercise in surrealist montage”, points out the author. Sontag was a pioneer in emphasizing the intrinsically manipulative potential of the image and its relationship to political propaganda and social control.
Another central thesis of the essay: that of photography as anesthesia. Photographing familiarizes us with the grotesque. Promising us more freedom (of conscience, of thought, of information), it ends up, instead, anesthetizing moral sensibility. On the other hand, it also invites us to sentimentality: photographs turn the past into an object of affective contemplation. They also feed the vanity of believing that we can understand the world exclusively through its visual reproduction. The author’s utopian suggestion: reduce the consumption of images to avoid becoming prisoners of the cave of.
Sontag uses a range of references to analyze the aesthetic and ideological transformation of photography in the United States. And it highlights the failure of the photographic image as a tool for equalization and social awareness. The “photographic vision” always beautifies, beautifies: “despite the intention declared by a photograph (…) which wants to reveal the truth and not the beauty, the photograph still beautifies. (…) Even in the worst cases, the real has pathos. And this one pathos it is… beauty.”
Photographs give shape and apparent unity to the world. In capitalist society, they are entertainment, propaganda and a surveillance tool: political freedom is transmuted into consumer freedom, which requires unlimited consumption of images. “Although it comes from half a century ago, Susan Sontag’s voice about photography still resonates powerfully, because she detected the essence of the visual culture that has led us to post-photography: the ambivalence between documenting the world and constructing it, the symbolic possession of reality, the excess of images and their anesthetic capacity, the power and ethics of the gaze when we have a camera in our hands… I wish she had survived to update this analysis in the age of AI”, explains Per Cesca Castellví
About photography
Susan Sontag. Trans. Anna Llisterri
Arcadia
245 pages. 22 euros
