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The Reality through Artificial Lens 

 

Susan Sontag, the author of “In Plato’s Cave,” urges people to resist

accepting the world “as the camera records it” (475). In her essay, Sontag, a well-known American novelist who has won several awards—including the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award for her novel On Photography—in which “In Plato’s Cave” is excerpted, talks about the impacts that the technology of photography has brought upon the modern age and its people. As an evangelist of the new age, Sontag questions the potential “result of the photographic enterprises” and the “changes [in] the terms of confinement in the cave, our world” (462). By the cave, Sontag is also alluding to the theory of allegory of cave developed by Plato, in where prisoners of the cave learn objects through shadows and blindly name those objects which they cannot see. Sontag agrees with Plato in her essay, as she draws a metaphor between the shadows in the cave and photographs in the world. Moreover, the age of photography has “alter[ed] and enlarge[d people’s] notions of what is worth looking at and what [they] have a right to observe,” and gives them the opportunity “to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability”—blurring the lines of privacy and boundaries among people (Sontag 462, 471). Photography also gives people the illusion that they “can hold the whole world in their heads—as an anthology of images”; the “equivocal magic of the photographic image” forbids people from recognizing photographs as “pieces of [the world], miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (Sontag 462-463). Even though people can capture parts of the world and their daily lives—which they might want to keep indefinitely—in the form of photographs, they will essentially lose the values and importance of those moments in the act of recording them, and even further prevent themselves from actually gaining the experiences from the world and their daily lives. People cannot capture the world in their camera screens, nor could they behold the world in their own hands, not even in the form of a photograph. The incomplete images taken by a camera cannot encapsulate the beauty and intricacy of the world.

 

Jeanette Winterson, a British writer who has won various awards for her

fiction and essay writing, agrees with Sontag to the extent that people are too occupied by their “symbolic reality” and that eventually leads them to a world full of “illusion, narcotic, hallucination” (604). In her essay “Imagination and Reality,” Winterson states that people have failed to obey the wills of imagination and to take advantage of the power of imagination, and they have even given in to the power of symbolism and symbolic values. If people choose to “rediscover the intensity of the physical world,”—that is “to see into the life of things[,] to discriminate between superficialities and realities,” then they must go through the gate which prevents them from achieving the “continuous, multiple simultaneous, complex, abundant and partly invisible” reality of imagination (Winterson 607-608, 604). Unfortunately, most people have chosen “to stand mockingly on the threshold, claiming that nothing lies beyond” according to Winterson (607). Like Winterson, Sontag emphasizes the idea that the world of photography is a world of “deduction, speculation, and fantasy” (475). However, despite the influence of the symbolic world or the photographic world, people are still capable of deciding the kind of lifestyle they want to have. People, in the end, have the ability and authority to decide what is best for themselves.

 

Photographs “provide most of the knowledge people have about the look

of the past and the reach of the present,” but never give them the actual existence of both the past and the present (Sontag 463). People, therefore, are “depleted [of their own imagination] and prepared to accept a world of shadows” (Winterson 599). People, in this sense, are like the prisoners in the allegory of cave who think that the shadows that they see are real objects of the world, because they ignore reality and view the world based on narrow vision. Therefore, it is fair to speculate that people will assume what they see in photographs are real, and even further they might think that the photographs are the objects themselves. Photographs, though, cannot capture the past or the present, they nonetheless remind people of such existence. If a family wants to keep a record of itself, then it can get everyone in the family photographed, since photography can serve “to memorize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity of vanishing extendedness of family life” (Sontag 466). Yet, connections between family members can never be recorded—the magic cameras cannot capture such emotional and imaginative elements that human brains are capable of.  The intimacy of a family is maintained by the relations among its members, not by images.

 

This world is obviously not created for people’s “tacit imperatives of taste

and conscience,” but photographs are (Sontag 464). This world can be as odious and hateful as it can possibly be; photographs nevertheless have to go through “a narrowly selective” process to comply with the photographers’ standards—imposing their own biased and prejudiced point of view while photographing (Sontag 464). Winterson draws another similarity with Sontag, as she limns,

 

Each of those powerful agencies couples an assumption of its own importance with a disregard for individuality. Freedom of choice is the catch phrase but streamlined homogeneity is the objective. A people who think for themselves are hard to control and what is worse, in a money culture, they may be skeptical of product advertising. (598)

 

Like those powerful agencies, photographers value their own importance, and “are always imposing standards on their subjects”—eliminating the picture viewers’ knowledge of the real going-ons of the events and their perception of the outside world (Sontag 464). As it often happens, when one person is so fascinated by the photographs of certain place, he decides to travel to that place, and instead of finding the beautified photographic place he finds himself in a state of total disappointment. As Sontag has also pointed out, photographers “would take dozens of frontal pictures…until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film” (464). The interests that photographers have while shooting would capture the beautified and unreal scenes, but reality. Another note is that with the invention of PhotoShop and the other software that enable people to edit pictures, it is even harder for people to perceive realness in photographs. However, Sontag argues that “when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing,” cameras can “indeed capture reality” (Sontag 464). But despite the possibility of capturing reality, it rarely happens because people always have their own self-interests and other organizational interests revolving around. Interestingly, Winterson disputes Sontag, as she argues that people should see “beyond the view from the window, even though the window is its frame” (599). Thus, she is putting more responsibility on people for their lack of judgment, while Sontag accuses photography of shutting people out.  However, both writers agree that people can often be misled and manipulated by their network providers—powerful agencies, such as the government, media, education system, and even photographer; their perception of the real world is often disrupted by the different interests of those groups. People, thus, still live in Plato’s cave, in the “mere images of truth” which are provided to them by powerful people and groups (Sontag 462).

 

Sontag opines, “[a] photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of

absence” (471). In the action of photographing, people have essentially neglected themselves from participating in the event or place that they are recording since they are so busy taking photos for the “right” look. Their photographs will “furnish [the] evidence” that they have actually been to such a place or attended such an event, that is the most important thing for them. Photographs are the “presumption[s] that something exists, or did exist,” and this function of photographs seduces people deeper into the obsession for cameras (Sontag 464). Sontag also argues that “photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention” (468). For instance, photographer is portrayed as “someone in perpetual movement, someone moving through a panorama of disparate events with such agility and speed that any intervention is out of the question” in the movie, Man with a Movie Camera(Sontag 468). In the twentieth century, anyone can have a camera and be his own photographer. This wide spread of camera usage has actually, in a broader scale, prevented the mass population from perceiving the real world, but instead “give [them] an imaginary possession of a past [and a present] that is unreal” (Sontag 466). In addition, the materialistic values that the society has given to cameras, people are more interested in satisfying their consumerist appetite than to concern the true value of cameras. Our culture is obsessed with materialism and consumerism that it has no regard for any true values of this world. Photography has essentially become a tool to “materialize” everything that it records, and people tend to evaluate and judge those things based on how well those things are portrayed in photographs. Everything will “end in a photograph,” unless “imagination… fathom[s]” reality (Sontag 477, Winterson 608).

 

According to Winterson, photographs do not capture reality. Photographs

are symbols—symbols of an event, a moment, an experience; they are tangible, something that people can actually “touch and feel, sell and buy” (Winterson 603). But, reality is an art, an imagination. The reality of symbolism is the world that people are presently in right now, but the reality of imagination can never be captured by anything in this notional world—not even the magical cameras. In reality, imagination takes people to discover the real physical world and other unknown territories. It is the work of imagination that enables people to experience the “continuous, multiple, simultaneous, complex, abundant, and partly invisible” reality of the world (Winterson 608). Photographs limit this world and function as agents thwarting people’s imagination. We must combat their effects and influence to perceive the world fully.

 

Works Cited

 

Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” Making Sense: Constructing Knowledge in the

Arts and Sciences. Eds. Bob Coleman, Rebecca Brittenham, Scott Campbell and Stephanie Girard. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

 

Winterson, Jeanette. “Imagination and Reality.” Making Sense: Essays on Art,

Science, and Culture. Eds. Bob Coleman, Rebecca Brittenham, Scott Campbell and Stephanie Girard. 2nd Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
User-uploaded Content
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.