In Plato’s Cave.

“In Plato’s Cave“, Susan Sontag’s opening essay of her book “On Photography” (1977), offers insightful observations on the photographic image and its effects. Primarily dealing with fundamental issues in photographic production and reception, the text introduces a set of radical ideas at the core of her inquiry; photograph-as-deception, photograph-as-desire, photograph-as-environment…among many. Throughout the text, she identifies a series of (apparently) non-changing qualities in the nature of the photographic image with notorious precision, for many of her notions remain prominently active and revisited in the theoretical and philosophical study of aesthetic phenomena in the present day.

The book was published forty-five years after the publication of Walter Benjamin’s “A Short History of Photography” (1931) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), and only three years prior to the publication of Roland Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” (1980). All of which are considered theoretical landmarks in the critical study of the photographic image, highly regarded in academic circles and obligatory readings for most undergraduate students of artistic disciplines. In retrospection, I allow myself to make the following observation: while not explicitly, all these works recognize the photographic image as the sensual object at the center of the 20th-century milieu.

Unlike Benjamin and Barthes, in “In Plato’s Cave”, Sontag is less concerned about what the photographic image is, but what the photographic image does. For her study does not dwell deeply into the ethics of image-making and the transformative effects photographic reproduction has in all object, but into the effects of image reception in the collective (social) and individual psyche, one might say, she is regarded with “the ethics of seeing”.

Sontag’s critique–along with that of Benjamin and Barthes–asserts to crystalize a particular sensible milieu (of late-Modernity), a period of time in which photographic production and reproduction had taken a central place in the structuring of perceptual reality. Starting somewhere around the World Wars and concluding with Digitalization­–I will argue–, we no longer find ourselves in that epoch, yet, if we are to understand the world through the flow and mediation of signs, the technological developments that characterize the early 21st-century experience have moved photographic production and consumption even forward in the construction of the sensible sphere.

In present day, almost all personal device that enables social interaction must possess the capacity to produce, or at least, process (photographic) images. This is something of paramount importance to keep in consideration as we are revisiting the writing of a 20th-century theorist who had just started to notice photography’s shift from the occasional to the ordinary. In this sense, to photograph is no longer a duty reserved for the photographer but a matter of all-usage for all users; an ordinary obsession to turn reality into souvenir. In this respect, the ethics of seeing that Sontag problematizes in photography have not changed in principle but have since become more complex.

Ever since the publication of the essay, the photographic image underwent two paramount shifts in its natural and technical condition; first, the coming of digital photography, and second, the broader “universal” process of Digitalization and the Internet. Digitalization is, so far, the technological shift most characteristic of the early 21st century, for it has rearticulated entirely the modes of value production and abstraction; allowing for the acceleration of both. Posing drastic changes in the modes of production and circulation of images, as much as how these shaped the sensible and economic reality of an ever-more “interconnected” world.

The breaking point had occurred two years prior to the publication of “On Photography”, with the invention of the self-contained (portable) digital camera by Steven Sasson in 1975, which set loose the photograph from its medium specificity of film (chemical gelatine silver process) and printmaking (analog process of reproduction), allowing the photograph to emerge and move more easily. Screen and photographs were about to come together as a medium of their own. The digital turn in display technology of the late 2000’s and early 2000’s sophisticated screen and camera into a single compact carriable device, advancing the photograph to an ever more ubiquitous presence.

Comparable to her metaphorical observation: “photographs have become part of the furniture of the environment”[1], today one might assertedly claim that the screen is part of the “furniture environment” (if not the environment itself), furthermore, one can understand the device screen-camera as the threshold that immerses a person into its–digital–environment.

Moving towards Computational Photography, the digital photograph opens an interesting derivate to Sontag’s observations on the camera as a device that captures (1.) absence (pseudo-presence), and (2.) disappearance.[2] Both motifs of the non-being, or the already-gone. The paradoxical intervention that all light-capturing devices exercise on time: in its effort to capture reality, a photograph can only capture what is no longer real. Each record–Sontag is clear about this–does not capture reality but only an interpretation of it. Computational photography, one of the latest developments in digital photography (all smarthphones are equipped with this technology), operates in the exact same principle of pseudo-presence and interpretation.

It is a computational (programmed) process of composition similar to that of compression, it works the following way: to create a single photograph, the digital camera captures multiple frames in less than a second, the apparatus layers the frames on top of one another, and accommodates/combines/suppress the pixels from the multiple layers into one in order to compose what would be, according to its machine’s aesthetic criteria, the best possible image.

The conceived photograph is a made-up composition resulting from the machine’s own aesthetic determination, the moment-in-time that the camera captured never really occurred, it is an interpretation.–Yet how come can it be real still? What’s the substance that grants a moment its realness in a digital condition? To solve these questions seems an irrelevant project to me, although, I recognize that Sontag seems to have assertedly opened the way into this inquiry years prior to computational cameras having begun to capture non-existent moments.

“All photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”[3],

accounting for the all-evanescent objects in time, I wonder yet if there is a difference between the objects-in-time and the objects-of-time, a question that Sontag does not seem to entertain; such distinction, I think, would have been an insightful philosophical entry as we dwell deep into the photographs transgressive relation to time.

About Truth

Sontag, like many of her peers, was invested in the hopeless quest for truth. She brings forward her intention and its impossible conclusion as the starting point, “In Plato’s Cave“, the opening words into her inquiry, serve first as an indexical-literary reference to an originary problem underlying all aesthetic investigation: the confliction of image-reality. Secondly, a suggestive lead: that perceptual reality is the ever-resulting unbalance between truth and deception. Recurrent notions in her essay and overall work: deception, interpretation, transfixiation, illusion, transparency, epiphany–all terms of transformative revelation; they imply the truth-behind something, she uses these to describe the photograph’s epistemology and its limits.

So far, the advent of computational photography, along with more recent generative technology for image-making (AI Art, deep-fake, to same a few)–all used as technologies of deception with positive or negative effects–defines a time in which truth seems to have taken a backseat to other forms of illumination and seduction, the condition many have described as Post-truth. “In Plato’s Cave,” we are reminded that this condition of deceit is not a temporary phenomena but more of an ontological preoccupation, for which she goes all the way back to one of the very first philosophical questions: what’s real? So radical is her motive, that many of her arguments apply not exclusively to photography but to all image-making technology, and that is, to my own judgment, what makes her writing so competitive against time’s relentless melt.

Notes

[1] Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography, 2019. P. 23

[2] Sontag. P.16

[3] Sontag. P.16