Photography: Can there be a more deceptive art form than photography? Here is a medium that presents itself in the guise of a disinterested eye venturing out into the world and bringing back to us images that are at once particular and emblematic and, above all, real, writes John Banville
This, the photograph claims, is the truth; this is what happened; this is what that moment looked like, how the people appeared, what the weather was doing; it is actuality, reality at the actual moment the shutter blinked. The fact is, however, that a photograph is nothing like life, and vice-versa, if for no other reason than that the still image lacks a vital dimension, which is time. We live in a continuum of unstoppable movement and change. What was true and actual a nanosecond ago is no longer actual or true. Everything alters from instant to instant.
The photographer, therefore, is less like a painter than a pathologist, taking transparent cross-sections of something that was once living and fixing them for later scrutiny.
Then there is the problem of the point of view. The action that this picture presents could have looked entirely different had the photographer been standing a yard further to the right or left, or even a yard nearer to or farther back from his subject. One of the most uncanny and compelling and, not insignificantly, wordless sequences in modern cinema is the five minutes or so in Antonioni's Blow-Up that the protagonist spends in his studio enlarging a series of random snapshots taken in a nearly deserted suburban park. With the wind rustling eerily in trees on the soundtrack, Thomas, the photographer, played with dead-eyed vacancy by David Hemmings, realises that the sequence of pictures he has taken show not a pair of lovers larking together in and out of the park shrubbery on an overcast summer afternoon, but a deliberately set-up murder.
However fashionably po-faced Antonioni's film may have been (remember the ball-less and racquet-less tennis game at the end?) the questions it addressed were real and even profound. What do we see when we look? How do our desires, prejudices, lack of attention affect what we perceive? As the critic David Thomson writes of Blow-Up, "the enlarged photographs illustrate the way human beings impose their instinct for meaning on external reality". It is this "instinct for meaning", more than the intentions of the eye behind the camera, that presses itself upon the photograph, creating an aura of actuality and significance.
This is not to say that there are not great photographers, only that photography is not the straightforward, intentless medium we usually take it to be. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud notes the peculiar power of familiar things that have been made strange. The photograph, it might be said, works an opposite magic, making the world's essential strangeness seem familiar, graspable, immanent with meaning.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, one of the most alert and perceptive critics standing sentinel at what Lionel Trilling called the "bloody crossroads" where art and politics meet, revisits her short but influential study, On Photography, published a quarter of a century ago. Rehearsing some of the assertions put forward in the six essays that made up that book, she feels, so she confesses, "an irresistible temptation to quarrel with them". The two main ideas she examines again are, first, "that public attention is steered by the attentions of the media", which means, most decisively, images, and second, and it might seem conversely, "that in a world saturated, no, hyper-saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect; we become callous".
Inevitably, 25 years on and in the era of what she identifies as "the CNN effect: the feeling that something had to be done about the war in Bosnia was built from the attentions of journalists", Sontag is both a little wiser and a little more despairing. The conviction that contemporary life "consists of a diet of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we gradually become habituated," she writes, "is a founding idea of the critique of modernity, the critique being almost as old as modernity itself". In support of that last point she cites Wordsworth in 1800, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, denouncing the contemporary "craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", and Baudelaire, writing in his journal in the 1860s on the sensationalist journalism of the day: "Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors . . . And it is with this loathsome appetizer that civilized man daily washes down his morning repast." Yet Sontag is chary of the by now universally accepted diagnosis that "flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react". What, she asks, is really being asked here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what she called for in On Photography, "aecology of images". There isn't going to be an ecology of images. No committee of guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.
As to the other theme from On Photography that she revisits, "the determining influence of photographs in shaping what catastrophes and crises we pay attention to", her argument with it constitutes not a challenge but, on the contrary, what seems a reaffirmation. A long-time student of French cultural theory (in the 1960s she spent time in Paris and returned to the US bearing news of Barthes and his brethren) she nevertheless takes strong issue with latter-day savants such as Jean Baudrillard, whose message, as she reads it, is: "Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media." This kind of thinking she dismisses as "breathtaking provincialism". During the Bosnian war she lived for some months in Sarajevo, where, among other activities, she produced a version of Waiting for Godot, and has nothing but contempt for the "French day-trippers" who dropped in to have a look at the city under siege.
One can almost feel the sting of her whip as she lashes back at the armchair philosophers who would dare to question the motives of those such as herself who actually ventured into what, without irony, is called the theatre of battle; citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier, from one's chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority. In fact, deriding the efforts of those who have borne witness in war zones as "war tourism" is such a recurrent judgment, that it has spilled over into discussions of war photography as a profession.
Regarding the Pain of Others is not, in fact, as much concerned with war photography as it is with the iconography of warfare as presented through the medium of television. At the time when On Photography was published, photographers such as Don McCullin were still the ones we mainly depended on to bring us back graphic evidence from the killing fields; nowadays it is the anonymous television cameramen of CNN and their fellows who convey the live action, in living, dying colour. Yet Sontag insists on taking the long view. "Images," she writes, "have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching. But watching up close, without the mediation of an image, is still just watching."
Nor is she as insistent as we might have expected on the necessity for us to remain in constant witness of the world's horrors. In a moving passage towards the close of the book she meditates on the poignancy of remembering and the necessity, sometimes, to forget. "Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead," she writes; thus, remembering is an "ethical act".
But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.
On the evening that I finished reading this book the news came that the Bush administration had decided to release photographs of the corpses of Saddam Hussein's two sons, killed in a ferocious gunfight at a house in northern Iraq. It seemed that Iraqis simply would not believe that these two wicked men, over whose deaths the news media indulged in a shameless orgy of gloating, were really dead unless pictorial evidence was produced. When the photographs appeared, however, the citizens of Baghdad were still sceptical. Today, as I finished writing this review, it was reported that a tape had been issued on which Saddam was heard expressing his grief for his sons.
"Reports from Iraq indicate," the newsreader said, "that the Iraqi people found the tape far more convincing proof that the men were dead than the photographs had been." Who really believes that the camera never lies?
John Banville's most recent novel, Shroud, is published by Picador. His non-fiction book, Prague Pictures, part of the Writers and the City Series, published by Bloomsbury, will appear in September
Regarding the Pain of Others. By Susan Sontag, Hamish Hamilton, 117pp, £12.99