Photography and Film
Although On Photography was not published until 1977, it emanated from a series of essays Sontag began writing in the early 1970s—work that would be interrupted by her breast cancer, which would take nearly three years to treat, and by an uncertainty about how to proceed as a writer after her first four books seemed to define her as a critic and theorist rather than as the novelist she aspired to be. Her diary from this period reflects a writer discouraged by the reception of both her films and her novels, although she was full of ideas for both, and achieved considerable critical success with a documentary, Promised Lands (1974).
Shot in Israel after the Yom Kippur War, Sontag’s film is an exploration of Jewish identity—including her own, as she freely admitted to interviewers. Arabs have no voice in the film; that is, none are interviewed, although the sounds and images of Arabs are everywhere in this probing study of the land and the Jewish and Arab claims to it. The film is also an exemplification of her writing about photography, a problematic form of recording and interpreting the world. On the one hand, Sontag noted that photographs seem so real that they are used as documentary evidence. On the other hand, like all representations of reality, photographs distort and are subject to all sorts of distortions, depending on how they are cropped, edited, lit, angled, and presented (with or without captions). Thus Promised Lands is a work of art that comments not only on its ostensible subject matter but on itself. As Howard Kissel noted, Sontag let the “images speak for themselves” even as she recognized that they, too, were subject to criticism since the images could be paradoxical, contradictory, and ambiguous.1 Again and again the film is framed with commentary, which is itself framed by shots of the land and people the commentators discuss. No closure, no final interpretation of what the film means is possible because of its Hegelian methodology, which, as Stanley Kauffmann noted, exposes the partiality of truth that the images and the monologues explore.2 Although some reviewers disparaged Promised Lands as “haphazard,” to use Nora Sayre’s word, and called the film “stupefyingly tedious” (David Moran), Byron Stuart spoke for many others in observing the sharp contrast between the abstractions of Sontag’s on-camera witnesses and the concrete reality of the film’s images. And previous denigrators of Sontag’s work, such as the critic John Simon, gave the film a respectful reception.3
More than Sontag’s early novels and two previous films, Promised Lands is able to reify her persistent desire to investigate the world of dreams (illusions) and how those conceptions or abstractions impinge on reality, a reality that the camera can make more palpable than Sontag’s prose. But in a way Promised Lands also questions the viability of documentary itself, of its effectiveness in presenting a complex vision of reality and individual perceptions of that reality. Photographs, as Sontag argues in On Photography, are subject to all the limitations that beset any form of interpretation. As a result, the only way forward is to constantly question what photographs show, what commentators say, and to create, as she does in On Photography, an anthology of all that has been said about photography as a medium of communication. John Simon described Sontag’s vision in Promised Lands as “tragic irony,” perfectly capturing her contention that a double perspective is needed—which, again, is a Hegelian approach revealing that an idea, when pushed to its extreme, turns into its opposite, which, in turn, is the very definition of irony.
That Sontag began her work as a series of essays before conceiving of them as a book is important in assessing the style and structure of On Photography. Each essay was a process of discovery for her, and given her adversarial attitude toward her own writing—her desire to argue with herself—each essay also becomes a response and even a counterargument to the previous one. Furthermore, for book publication she extensively revised and expanded the essays. As a result, On Photography is her most layered and textured work, reflecting the back-and-forth of thinking about a subject that is never quite settled in her mind and, indeed, became a subject to which she would return in Regarding the Pain of Others.
“In Plato’s Cave,” the first essay, provides the gist of an argument that she continues to refine, augment, adjust, and correct in subsequent essays and, in fact, throughout her career. In this opening gambit, she takes issue with the common tendency to regard photographs as not merely statements about the world but as “pieces of it” (4). In fact, at best photographs are fragments of reality—but not even that, to be precise—because they are reflections of the world, not the world itself. They are, in sum, like those images reflected on the cave walls of Plato’s allegory about truth. We cannot see the truth directly; we only apprehend it indirectly as the images or shadows cast by the truth. Truth cannot exist in and of itself, in other words, but must be interpreted. In this respect, photographs are no different from any other representation of truth: photographs do not speak for themselves any more than facts speak for themselves, even though it has often been said that they do. And because photographs are fragments, they make of the world a piecework of items (photographs) that are reductive because they represent only a part of the world. Even more problematic is the phenomenon of packaging photographs, for then they too become artifacts, objects in themselves that are part of a photographer’s design. In short, photographs impose themselves on the world and appropriate the world, making it impossible to view photographs as more innocent and less meddling with reality than other kinds of art.
Even more disturbing, photography is a kind of imperialistic enterprise, taking possession of the world and making of the world an opportunity to produce more photographs, and not necessarily more truth. The hegemony of the photograph, even in the hands of tourists, is another way in which the world’s complexity is diminished. Indeed, what gets into photographs is what is photogenic, which means that certain aspects of the world are obscured or ignored. The significance of all events and places are shaped in terms of the medium of photography.
An almost sinister aspect of photography becomes apparent when Sontag suggests that it can be used as a weapon to shoot the world. Photographers go gunning for images and saturate human consciousness with visuals that actually disconnect viewers from reality. Photographs destroy narrative and a sense of continuity and temporality. History, the complex developments of time, is subsumed in the spatial frame of the photograph. What results is not knowledge but its semblance, which can be an arresting, even erotic, attraction to images without the requisite intellectual grasp of what those images purport to show.
Sontag’s relentless exposure of photography’s limitations resulted in considerable opposition to her arguments, with many critics pointing out how photographs contribute to an understanding of the world. However, as Sontag pointed out in her diaries, she was a polemical writer. She began by staking out a position and exploring its implications. In other words, she would not let go of an argument until she had exhausted its power. She was quite willing to return to the same argument later, as she did in Regarding the Pain of Others, and modify or even reject the premises of earlier arguments, replacing them with antithetical interpretations. But in the full heat of her first essay on photography, she felt obliged to continue the momentum of what almost could be called “Against Photography.” That she did not give the book such a title reflects, as she freely admitted, her own attraction to photographs, which is why she begins with Plato, for Sontag includes herself in the masses who have been seduced by photographs and taken them for truth.
In “America Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” Sontag suggests that photography has become an extension of Walt Whitman’s ambition to make a democratic art of poetry, and to make art itself a demystifying organ of perception. Anything, in the age of Andy Warhol, can be pictured or photographed as art. As the essay’s title implies, Sontag is skeptical of this kind of democratization because it blends everything together and makes everything equally important, as in Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This quest to universalize experience, to make all peoples one and the same, destroys a sense of history and makes politics irrelevant. Opposed to this Whitmanian tradition is photographer Diane Arbus, whose photographs insist on the specificity, even the alienness, of her human subjects. They have been called “freaks,” Sontag notes. Even so, Arbus cannot escape the reductive and misleading nature of her medium, so that her portraits, shot straight on, create the illusion of self-revelation, as if her subjects remain part of Whitman’s project to fully disclose his nation through his art. The freaks, then, become just part of the democratic mix.
Focusing on Arbus’s biography, Sontag wonders whether the photographs of freaks actually diminished the photographer’s sense of pain that led to her suicide. Has Arbus done no more than simply expand the range of acceptable subjects in photographs rather than reveal anything of significance about them? Sontag compares the Jewish Arbus to Jewish writer Nathanael West in presenting “deformed and mutilated” (42) subjects in reaction to family values and culture that promoted healthy mindedness. Were Arbus’s photographs a reaction against the glossy commercial world she had worked in, treating that world with an irony that is absent from the work of Andy Warhol, another artist who began in commercial art? Sontag sees Arbus’s work, whatever its limitations, as a rebuke to Whitman’s belief that he could comprehend the whole country through his art.
At this stage of her argument, in “Melancholy Objects,” Sontag is ready to take on the putative realism of photographs, contending that they are actually a species of surrealism. By putting up borders around reality with its images, photography is inherently surrealistic, reshaping and bending the world to its medium, which is superficial, a reading of surfaces without depth. She notes that certain photographers have nevertheless thought of themselves as scientists or moralists, romantics, and documentarians, but what their work gains in explanatory power, it also loses in its selectiveness, class bias, or refusal to make distinctions in subject matter so that everything is simultaneously important but as a result also unimportant. Photographs injure time, scrambling moral and historical differences, which certain photographs attempt to remedy by the use of captions and commentary. These editorial attachments to photographs she compares to critic Walter Benjamin’s use of quotations as a way of collecting the world.
“The Heroism of Vision” continues Sontag’s exploration of photography’s superficiality, its attraction to surfaces as opposed to paintings, for example, which are constructions and reveal more than the moment photographs disclose. To see is not to know, she points out, and yet the modern sensibility has become enamored of the lens as a way of identifying reality. Knowledge and pleasure become an ocular phenomenon—so much so that the ethical and contextual nature of truth is overwhelmed by the seeming concreteness and specificity of photographs. And the sheer quantity of photographs makes it impossible to determine what is truly significant and truthful. As the essay’s title suggests, the photographic way of seeing has been valorized to the detriment of other ways of knowing.
“Photographic Evangels” centers on the contradictory arguments of photographers, which seems to Sontag defensive. Is photography the product of rational choices the artist makes, or is it a fluid, intuitive medium, expressive of a spontaneity other arts cannot rival? Is the photograph a record or the product of a personal, aesthetic vision? The questions arise because photographers have given such varying, conflicting answers. She suggests that the medium is “inherently equivocal” (123), which is one reason why she hesitates to call it art. Compared to the fine arts, especially painting, photography can seem undiscriminating, “promiscuous” (129).4 And this is why photographers have had to argue so strenuously for the aesthetic nature of their enterprise. Part of the problem as well is the extensive vocabulary that has been developed for evaluating paintings and the still meager language used to describe photographs. Too often the photograph is merely called “interesting” (138).
“The Image-World,” Sontag’s final essay, comes full circle to her beginning invocation of Plato. Given the infinite reproducibility of photographs, what does it mean to call one photograph an original and another a copy? Such distinctions have always been important in fine art, but the duplication of photographs calls into questions its status as art—at least in traditional terms. Judging photography by the highest standards is also complicated by the developments in technology that have made cameras so user-friendly and portable. Can anyone be an artist? An artist by accident? Can photographs be an aid to reflection, or do photographs deflect the ability to analyze reality. How, in sum, can photographs be curated, singled out, and deemed art? Somehow, Sontag suggests, an ecology of images has to be established.
As a way of displaying the manifold ways photography has been described, analyzed, and promoted, the book includes “A Brief Anthology of Quotations.” This section might be thought of as Sontag’s own ecological response to photography, since she selects those statements that highlight the possibilities and limitation of the photographical medium.
It is hardly surprising that given the power of Sontag’s polemical book, and the publicity given to her ideas, that many reviewers took issue with her vision of photography. Ben Lifson criticized Sontag for not acknowledging the pleasures of photography and of not doing justice to its ethical and aesthetic possibilities. In effect, she was as reductive about photography as she said photography was about reality. Edward Grossman called On Photography a “profoundly reactionary meditation” by a bookish person who preferred words over images. Candace Leonard contended that Sontag could not speak of “reality” without an intervening medium such as photography. All reality had to be contextualized or framed in some way. Alfred Kazin pointed out that language could distort reality as much as photography and like other critics was uneasy about Sontag’s penchant for separating photography from the social and historical context in which it emerged. Similarly, Harvey Green wondered why photographs should be any more distorting than documents. Weren’t both fragments? In fact, this weakness in On Photography was what Sontag set out to remedy later in Regarding the Pain of Others. Laurie Stone deplored Sontag’s analogies: “If comparing cancer to an imperialist army distorts our concept of cancer, doesn’t comparing a camera to a gun distort the reality of a camera?” Even Sontag’s anthology of quotations came in for criticism. Paul Lewis argued that she had engaged in a surrealism that was like the very photography she attacked.5
While On Photography received mostly mixed to negative reviews, several distinguished critics seemed more attuned to her tone and manner. William Gass, for example, described On Photography as “brief but brilliant,” a “meditation, not a treatise,” which is to say that the book was not as doctrinaire as several reviewers made it out to be. In like fashion Michael Starenko appreciated Sontag’s dialectical approach, which revealed a process of thinking about photography that he found extraordinarily valuable. Rudolf Arnheim extolled Sontag’s “rhapsodic” style,” and if John Simon was not certain what to make of Sontag’s own position on photography, he admired her for presenting “unanswered questions in the place of false security and dangerous misconceptions.” Robert Melville was less troubled by knowing exactly where Sontag stood, regarding the book as a whole, including her anthology of quotations, as indicative of her “ironic neutrality.”6
Sontag herself responded to the reviews by calling out critics on her use of the word “aggressive.” In itself, she told interviewer Jonathan Cott, “aggressive” was true of almost any form of activity, any assertion of self in the world. Sontag herself loved photographs, she insisted, and perhaps attending more to that aspect of her experience might have quelled some of the criticism. At any rate, she also took a much broader view of her work than did the reviewers. She suggested that On Photography was part of her quest to “ask what it means to be modern.”7
Sontag’s near final words on the subject of photography come in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Here she begins by analyzing Virginia Woolf’s response to photographs of atrocities during the Spanish Civil War. Woolf, a pacifist, argued in Three Guineas, that the slaughter of noncombatants depicted in the photographs aroused the deepest rejection of war. But to Sontag, the photographs might also cause others to increase support for the besieged Spanish republic. Woolf’s reading of the photographs denied the possibility of a political reaction informed by knowledge of Spain’s history. This judgment, undoubtedly informed by Sontag’s own experiences in the siege of Sarajevo, also signals how much she had changed as a writer, who now included in her nonfiction and fiction a profound awareness of history and how it shapes our perceptions.
She also brought to Regarding the Pain of Others a much more acute understanding of how much human psychology and politics can sensitize or desensitize reactions to photographs. It had become standard practice to dismiss photographs as fabricated if they did not support one’s politics (10). What is more, the same photograph can result in contrary responses: “A call for peace. A cry for revenge” (13). And a more neutral observer may just take atrocity photographs as further confirmation of a terrible world. Consequently, it is far more difficult to pin down the implications of a photograph. Readers of the Kindle edition of Regarding the Pain of Others have highlighted this passage: “In contrast to a written account—which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership—a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all” (20).8 Even more Kindle readers have been taken with Sontag’s questioning of Woolf’s assertion that “Photographs are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye” (26). To this Sontag rejoins that photographs cannot be regarded simply as evidence, as facts, and given their status also as personal testimony, she questions how can they be regarded as an “objective record” (26).9 The photographer’s intentions, Sontag adds, cannot determine the photograph’s significance, since it will be taken up and distorted by many different viewers for their own purposes (39).
Much more than in On Photography, Sontag explores in Regarding the Pain of Others the way photographs actually enter the world, which is often as “staged” or composed—like other works of art. Photographs are associated with real moments, and yet, as with the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, such “real” moments have been reenacted for the camera. And because photographs seem so much a part of the world they represent, it comes as a shock and a disappointment when we learn that so-called reality has been composed or recomposed. The idea of performing for the camera, as Theodore Roosevelt did when he agreed to retake San Juan Hill one more time so that it would look more exciting, disabuses the viewer of the notion that photographs can ever be, as Woolf said, “a crude statement of fact.” They are often not crude at all but practiced and polished. Thus, to this day, Robert Capa’s photograph of a soldier falling in the moment of death has been challenged. Did the death really occur in war, and was Capa’s work fortuitous? Was the photograph taken during a military exercise? Evidence exists to support the truth of what Capa shot, but the issue, Sontag suggests, cannot be settled because of photography’s ambiguous status as both faithful report and interpretation.
Sontag also confronts the question of what ultimate impact photographs have. Is there a time limit on shocked reactions to gruesome photographs of war? Doesn’t shock wear off as the viewer becomes inured to what is seen? And yet Sontag contends that “habituation is not automatic” (82). On the contrary, outrage and shock can also increase with repeated viewings. Just as paintings of the crucifixion do not become jejune for the faithful, so photographs of atrocities can continue to appall and provoke a full-hearted response. Indeed, the power of certain pictures may be so great that people look away from them, which is a way of saying their impact has not abated.
Still, as in On Photography, Sontag is troubled by the limitations of photography when compared to narrative. Photographs cannot present arguments or stories. She takes issue, for example, with New York Times correspondent John Kifner, who claimed of one war photograph that “the image is stark, one of the most enduring of the Balkan wars: a Serb militiaman casually kicking a dying Muslim woman in the head. It tells you everything you need to know” (89). Not so, Sontag protests. She then dates the photograph (April 1992), taken during the first month of the Serbian “rampage through Bosnia” (90). Even though the photograph is quite detailed, as Sontag describes it, she suggests that the “photograph tells us very little—except that war is hell, and that graceful young men with guns are capable of kicking overweight older women lying helpless, or already killed, in the head” (90). Don’t such photographs, and others taken during the Vietnam War, serve to “confirm what we already know (or want to know)?” (92), Sontag asks. It is a genuine question—like several she poses about the need to observe and for some to protest the grisly and barbaric rites of war.
Sontag is more certain that even seemingly apathetic responses to photographs of war atrocities are the reactions of those who may be “full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration” (125). Regarding the Pain of Others expresses her “irresistible temptation” (104) to quarrel with the premise of On Photography—that “in a world saturated, no, hyper-saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect; we become callous” (105). She wonders what evidence there is to support the notion that “our culture of spectatorship neutralized the moral force of photographs of atrocities” (105)? And her own solution, calling for an “ecology of images”—in sum, for a more discriminating response to photography—is impossible. There can be no committee, no guardians, to “ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock” (106).
Sontag now identifies a reality that “exists independent of the attempts to weaken its authority” (109) through photographs, which frame and also leave out vital details. Photographs do fragment the world, Sontag still believes, but the world itself, history, remains whole. In other words, we do not view the world exclusively through media like television. Indeed, she dismisses the arguments for a world that is now moderated, so to speak, by media as “fancy rhetoric.” She specifically attacks French thinkers such as Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard who believe images have become reality. She calls their argument “something of a French specialty” (109). It is their kind of thinking about the “death of reality” that led to the idea that the siege of Sarajevo would be stopped or not depending on how the media covered it. Sontag, who put her life on the line in several visits to the shelled city, where trips out into the street exposed her to sniper fire, believes she was in touch with a reality that could not be entirely captured or defined by the camera. “To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism,” she contends. “It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment” (110). But the world contains real suffering, and its consequences cannot be obliterated by “those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality” (109).
Drawing on her own trips to Sarajevo, and mindful of those who attacked her as a grandstanding visitor, Sontag launches her defense by arguing against jaded intellectuals who are incapable of experiencing the reality of war. These modern thinkers see the violence as a spectacle and therefore see her own participation in the siege as insincere. She suggests that some commentators do all that is possible to prevent themselves from being engaged in the suffering of others. Instead, they sit back, confident of their superiority and liken her to photographers who are “war tourists” (111). The role of those photographers and their photographs, she emphasizes, is to ask us to “pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalization for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable?” (117). It is no refutation of these photographs to note that some people will not look at them or will change the channel.
The argument that impugns photographs because they are just a form of watching also provokes Sontag’s rebuke. Photographs are just another way of watching the world—not the only way. Like the mind itself, photographs both view and stand back from the world itself, and “there’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking” (118), Sontag affirms. In the end, she contends that there is no substitute for experiencing war or any kind of reality firsthand. But photographs, like other reports about the world, express the need to draw as close as possible even if we cannot be right there. For those who are there, Sontag concedes ultimate authority. We cannot understand, and cannot imagine. But underpinning her argument is also an unspoken rebuttal: we certainly need to try.
Like On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others received mixed reviews, with critics once again spoiling to take issue with Sontag—as did Peter Conrad, who asserted that photographs were not any more influential or powerful than words. Revolutionary slogans did quite as well as photographs before the camera was invented, he pointed out. So, how could words be the “antidote to images”? Conrad noted that the book was an amplification of a Sontag lecture and as such seemed bloated and repetitive. John Leonard, who had closely followed Sontag’s career, saw her as still “shuffling contradictions” and “dealing provocations.” He seemed less impressed with her individual arguments than with her continuing ability to “make us think.” And this was the response of other reviewers who were willing to honor the gravity of Sontag’s arguments, even if they were not certain that she was right. As a later critic, Philip Lopate, puts it in his book Notes on Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others is “altogether a more measured, sober, qualifying and open-ended book” (190) than On Photography.10
Lopate also notes that the prose style of the later book is “less preening … and inclined to break into sentence fragments: ‘Photographs of atrocities may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.’ This is the prose manner of late Sontag: forthright, conversational, much-interviewed, and hearing that interviewee voice in her head, transcribing it straight out” (190). Yet she is still prone to overstatement, Lopate suggests, qualifying his own praise. She seems unduly sure that certain wartime photographs have been staged when the evidence is not altogether clear. Lopate senses that for all Sontag’s willingness to recant some of her opinions about photography, she is still a profound skeptic of the optics of photographs—that by seeing we can also know what is seen.
Although released two decades before Regarding the Pain of Others and five years after the publication of On Photography, Sontag’s film Unguided Tour (1982) seems like a coda to her studies of the visual image. Set in Venice, the film includes the customary shots of St. Mark’s Cathedral, the canals, the palaces, the leonine faces on the facades of bridges and buildings, but set against these monuments is the troubled tour a couple makes of the city state. Their mood seems taken from the Sontag story with the same title (included in I, etcetera), and from a single sentence: “They say a trip is a good time for repairing a damaged love” (e-book location 2930). Lucinda Childs, Sontag’s lover when the film was shot, is the film’s austere and elegant heroine, a dancer who walks with a studied grace as her male companion follows her lead, trying to sort out her moods with imploring and yearning looks that are reminiscent of Sontag’s own plangent passages of lovesickness in her diaries. Childs was an exquisite choice to exemplify the lover as an object of veneration. The camera lingers on her taut somber profile, her lean and supple body, her dark and brooding brows, her withholding gestures, as she turns away from her lover’s attempt to kiss her. Later in a courtyard solo, she turns her body into a pinwheel in imitation of the pinwheels that are shown spinning together in several shots. The dance encompasses her aloof attractiveness and the whirling emotions that she prefers to contain within herself.
The scene constantly shifts from streets, to squares, to boats, to canals, to a palace interior where it seems, momentarily, that the couple have reconciled, merging together in a wonderful waltzing routine. But this reunion is fleeting as the couple is parted once again in the estrangement of their separate selves. Tourism is no way to begin again; it is, in fact, as the story “Unguided Tour” suggests, a way of ending things. Seeing the world as a spectacle, as a picture, as a photograph, is a romantic quest but also an evasion of reality, of the waters that are slowly rising in the Venice of Unguided Tour. Everyone becomes awash with an encroaching grim reality that neither the buildings nor the people pictured gazing and grouping around these edifices can assuage or ameliorate. Sontag’s equation of photographs with an evasion of reality perhaps accounts for her diary entry for February 21, 1977: Sontag included “being photographed” and “taking photographs” (416) in her list of things she disliked.
And yet Sontag’s interest in photographs and photographers never waned. Indeed, as her lover Annie Leibovitz reports in A Photographer’s Life, Sontag encouraged Leibovitz to always have a camera on hand—even when she was off duty, so to speak. Sontag became one of Leibovitz’s favorite subjects, and Sontag contributed an introduction to Leibovitz’s collection Women (1999), reprinted in Where the Stress Falls. The book is a sampling, Sontag suggests, of how women’s roles have changed in the past decade, although she regards them still as a minority in every sense except the numerical. Thus, Sontag writes, Leibovitz photographs women engaging in “new zones of achievement” (237), even as they remain subject to degrading stereotypes. Women are a unique subject, Sontag argues, a work in progress in a way that men are not. By simply appearing in these photographs, women are modeling examples of success, self-esteem, victimhood, and aging well. Women are shown in roles that men have already made their own, and so they become objects of interrogation that would not arouse interest in a book devoted to men. She notes that restrictive views of women are embedded in language—all languages that never use the pronoun “she” to refer to humanity as a whole.
In the history of photography, women are most often portrayed for their beauty and men for their character: “Men didn’t look wistful. Women, ideally, didn’t look forceful” (240), Sontag notes. Even when women became photographers, such as Julia Margaret Cameron, they adopted the male view of women. Cameron photographed “exalted” portraits of femininity. So ingrained is the subject of women as beauties that a collection of photographs without beautiful women in it might well be regarded as misogynistic, Sontag suggests. The only exception she allows in her catalogue of women as beautiful types, existing to be photographed for their beauty of form, is the depiction of goddesses and other mythic creatures, but such women are the subjects of sculpture and painting, not photography, which most often situated women in the domestic sphere.
In the new economic reality of America, women must work, and that fact alone has changed the way women are viewed and the way they view themselves, Sontag observes. Feminism may have helped changed attitudes toward women, but the way they make a living has made the decisive break with traditional definitions of womanhood. Even so, emphasizing the feminine in photographs of powerful women still seems a requirement, Sontag insists. And it is still regarded as a virtue for a woman to subordinate herself to her husband, as in the famous line from A Star is Born, when Vicki Lester (Judy Garland in the 1954 version) announces to the audience, “This is Mrs. Norman Main,” in tribute to the husband who discovered her and helped make her a star.
In Leibovitz’s photographs, Sontag sees women for the first time emerging as themselves, doing their jobs, and not catering to the convention of how attractive women are supposed to be posed for the camera. Even better, in Women, there is a “plurality of models” (248). The lack of a prescriptive program for women obviously delights Sontag. Eschewing any specific commentary on the photographs, Sontag wants the book to remain “open-ended.” And she closes her essay with the same statement followed by a question that undermines the statement: “A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?” (249).
In one of the most searching reviews of Women, Peter M. Stevenson identified the problem with Sontag’s apparent unwillingness to interpret Leibovitz’s photographs except in the most general sense:
Ms. Leibovitz ends her acknowledgments with, “I am extremely grateful to Anna Wintour and Vogue.” If only Ms. Sontag had written an essay that tackled head-on Ms. Leibovitz’s financial and artistic symbiosis with “today’s hugely complex fashion-and-photography system.” What would she make of the photograph, taken from below, of the red panties and crotches of four faceless, high-kicking Kilgore College Rangerette cheerleaders? Is it commentary—the male sports establishment exploits women by making them dress up as cheerleaders—or is it appreciation? How does the photograph jibe with Ms. Sontag’s statement that this is a book about women’s “ambition,” which women have been “schooled to stifle in themselves”? Is a photograph of women’s underwear a celebration of ambition?
Stevenson is perhaps not quite fair, since Sontag does say that some of the photographs show that women have not made much progress. A more specific criticism might ask, Which photographs are which? And that is perhaps Stephenson’s point. There is such a thing as being too open-ended.11
In her studies of photography Sontag has often contextualized her interpretations of photographs by dealing with the biographies—or at least with the careers—of photographers. That she does not do so with Leibovitz provokes an unanswered question. Was Sontag’s personal connection to the photographer perhaps a factor in her decision not to analyze the photographs? To have done so would have been to tie Leibovitz to her own cultural moment and her implication in both the commercial and aesthetic aspects of photography to which Stevenson alludes in his review.