In Platos Cave

A brief bulletin list of the points made throughout Susan Sontag's first essay in On Photography, "In Platos Cave"

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave - Susan Sontag

In one of the most seminal documents in the history of modern photography, acclaimed essayist and media critic Susan Sontag addresses the role of the photograph and its societal function through four distinct lenses.

1. Photography as a social practice and mass art

2. Photography as a way to feel power or control from a distance

3. Photography as a medium for empathy and moral education,

and finally,

4. Photography as a consumer product that feeds into our ever-growing image addiction

The title of the essay: In Plato’s Cave, is an allusion to the famous parable put forth by Antiquarian-Greek philosopher Plato in his body of work, Republic, which describes how images and their societal function as a perceived authorities silently governs the minds and desires of the people who view them. Sontag takes it further, and directly outlines the tightrope that image-makers must be aware lest they fall into the same tropes as those who’ve projected the illusions into their cave.

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1. Sontag asserts that taking a photograph is both a way to certify and reject an experience. By limiting our undertaken experiences and photographies’ subject matter to what we deem photogenic, travel becomes a means for accumulating more photographs. More certificates of where we’ve been or who we’ve met, missing the details of what isn’t worth the capture.

2. Power to sontag is a term which refers to both the malicious indent and the potential of the effect of its exertion.

3. The camera expresses our desire to inquire and explore the world around us, and the action of photographing it appropriates that stimulus. (appropriation here meaning putting oneself into a knowledgeable relationship with the object - forming powerful one)

4. Photographs are less-so statements of the world and instead a collection of miniature realities that anyone can make or acquire for themselves. This is in-line with the idea of abstraction as defined by Villem Flusser, a phenomenon which is suffered by both the written word and the imaged world, as we lose the ability to accurately decode them as time moves on.

5. If photography allows us knowledge, authority over a subject depiction. Then only logically could we assume that it allows us a veracity as well. A sense of inherent truth about the subject intwined in every photo. But this as we know is one of the most famous misconceptions of the medium which finds its roots back in the history of the photograph being used as an instrument of scientific investigation for the purposes of phrenology, biology, social darwinism and publicizing early celebrity.

6. Sontag makes an interesting point about photojournalism and how the journalist must make a mutually-exclusive decision between recording or intervening.

7. One of the attractions to photography is its ability to allow the photographer to explore sexuality or perverse themes while still safely distancing themselves from the action or subject being depicted, it’s not the same as physically closing that gap.

8. The talismanic usage of photographs express both a sentimental and magic feeling which content or lay claim to another reality than the one the viewer presently lives in.

9. The camera as a sublimation of the gun, an item that’s sold as a means to abstract and subject the rest of the world to the wielders gaze or feelings, turning them into objectified outlets.

10. Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what’s worth looking at and what we have the right to observe. An ethics of seeing by implying invisible urgency or rhetoric.

11. “To suffer is one thing: another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate…the ethical content of photographs is fragile”

    Sontag asserts that own their own, images cannot move conscience and must exist within a greater context or discomfort

12. The allegory of the cave is one that embodies the idea put forth by Socrates that we cannot trust our senses. We can’t trust the things we merely see, hear or talk about, appearances aren’t knowledge. Which ties back to Sontag initial quote “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave” as long as we insist that photographs are the truth.

13. The camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses

14. Taking the “fit-pic” is an aesthetic of consumerism to which we’ve all become victims to.