Les Parisiennes

Les Parisiennes Vol 1

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I have always wondered why Susan Sontag insisted that “to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” Like Henri Cartier Bresson, I had wanted to be a painter who carefully constructs images, rather than the photographer who merely discloses. Maybe I finally am.

In Paris I have found myself once again a villain from Sontag's essays On Photography: an armed version of the solitary walker … stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur who finds the world 'picturesque.'

I finally agree with Sontag that photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy. Nothing more than a way of imprisoning reality which I can't possess. The fears and concerns Sontag expressed in her reflection on the photographic medium half a century ago have proven prophetic. We have replaced social change by a change in the production of images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods has become the essence of freedom. Our free economic consumption through unlimited potential for production and consumption of images is replacing our free political choice. What about the women photographed in Paris? Are their likneses art?

With the aid of technology, photography has become an art no different than painting or poetry. Can this new photography replace the traditional notion of a fine art? What of the activity of certain individuals Sontag saw as producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, even if that value is recognized only by very few discerning aesthetes. Form the beginning photography has lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography⁠—the proof it once supplied as evidence of existence⁠—is no longer valid. The real, according to Heidegger, has been showing itself in the light of Ideas ever since the time of Plato. The thinker only responded to what addressed itself to the observable thoughts to confirm the ideas of art. Today machines listen to our dreams and reproduce them in images on two dimensional surfaces. What about tomorrow?

Not every artist is a liar and a thief. Not every photographer must be posesive subliminal murderer. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is how it has been absorbed by Ideas that insist on keeping us in the cave made of our dreams. In the long run, will that make us stronger or weaken our grip on reality? The poet Friedrich Hölderlin declares: ‘But where the danger is, grows the saving power also.’ The only question that remains now: can art and photography still be saved?

All images via Midjuorney /imagine: Hasselblad 100 mm f2.2 on Fuji Provia 100F -- v 4 + Adobe LR + PS

About author

Cezary Gesikowski is a digital artist based in Ottawa, Canada.

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