Anti-photography

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Susan Sontag (On Photography)

When I got back from Kazakhstan with a bad back and realized that I had to travel immediately to the west coast of the US, there were some hard decisions to make. The doctor’s advise was not to lift more than five kilos. I decided that two bags of five kilos each should be okay, if I didn’t lift both at the same time. Even that relaxed limit did not allow me to carry any photographic gear or binoculars (and this is a great time for birding around the San Francisco bay). The travel office had booked me a ticket which gave me time for a bit of birding before my meeting. Some years ago I’d got myself a pair of spectacles meant for long distance vision, and that came in handy.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.

Susan Sontag (On Photography)

Not long back I began to read Susan Sontag’s book called “On Photography” and thought that behind the polemics and hyperbole there might be a point to what she wrote. Since I had decided not to take my camera on this trip, I thought I might try to experience the Bay Area in a pre-photographic manner. My bucket list now lives as pins on a map with a few words about the place. Whenever I read about some place interesting I mark it with a “Want to go” pin. When I visit a place the pin either disappears or becomes a “favourite” or a “starred place”. There’s so much I’ve read about the bay area that it was dotted with pins. I decided to spend one evening dawdling in the Mission district. It was good to look at street art, walk into lively bars, and eat at a restaurant with interesting music without bothering to record it. If you are into any of these things you might want to visit.

Recently, photography has almost become as widely practiced an amusement as sex or dancing — which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art.

Susan Sontag (On Photography)

I did eventually did take a few photos with my phone. On the last evening after the meeting, I went with everyone for dinner to a nice Chinese eatery on a little spit of land in Emeryville. The view across the bay was calm, and the fog had lifted for the first time in the week. I took up my phone and clicked a few photos without moving from my seat. The AI assistant in my phone camera was on. Now when I look at the photos that you see here, the only ones from the trip, I find that they are completely predictable. They are exactly the kind of mindless photos which fill many people’s Instagram stories: well-known locations, photographed in much the same way as ten million others have — they could be done by a generative AI.

WordPress AI generated this image to the prompt: Distant view of the San Francisco skyline from across the bay, without the Golden Gate bridge, against the sky at sunset.

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

Susan Sontag (On Photography)

I posted my photos to friends and family and I got the usual messages that you expect. This was a clear indication that if I am to improve my skills, I have to give up such facile image-making. I hadn’t realized that Susan Sontag’s critique of photography, from half a century ago, could develop new meaning in today’s context. This makes it a worthwhile book for me to engage with for longer.