Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their societies into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world — all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Sontag’s book was first published in 1977, before Facebook, Photoshop, and Instagram. In 2008 I bought my digital camera, a Canon PowerShot A590 IS. Nothing fancy. So far I’ve been using perhaps only 20% of this tool’s capabilities, its so-called powerful features. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles. All I need is to press this and click that. The thing is, just like any normal human clicker, I can’t get enough of these images, especially those I’ve taken of my four-year-old nephew, Ennio. Other people take endless shots of restaurant food, family reunions, birthday parties, office events, trips abroad, or weekend sports. Others photograph their hamsters or orchids to death. I like watching Ennio grow up in pictures. Sontag mentions the “compulsion to photograph.” Yes, it’s always something or someone. And it’s never enough of this or that.
It’s also the compulsion to collect photographs, including those taken by others. To me, Sontag’s “mental pollution” is too strong an indictment of the image-junkies culture many of us have succumbed to. I can be defensive here, of course, because this blog is an offshoot of my other blog on Tumblr, which is ideal for photo-hoarding albums and bite-sized quotations. Part of Tumblr’s appeal is the ease with which anyone can assemble or “curate” a gallery of pictures, quotes, videos, and audio clips just by clicking “like” and “reblog.” My reason for getting on the Tumblr wagon is such a cliché — I needed distraction, activity, consolation, therapy. A medical condition got me stranded in the house. I wanted to escape boredom, pain, depression. I needed some time away from the ugliness that the world peddles as "news" or "reality." I needed to heal in a parallel universe where aging bodies don't disintegrate piece by piece, don't require costly, tedious no-guaranteed-results maintenance. I found comfort in losing myself and my days in the art of Googling images and posting my distractions for all the world to see.
I’m one of those people who used to sneer at Facebook. Even now, I can see why some continue to dismiss Twitter and Tumblr as sites for attention-hungry, depth-deprived users. When I began my Tumblr Therapy, I constantly pestered myself with doubts. Am I selling out? Am I merely adding to the noise and clutter out there? And because all I could do then was stay home, sit in my room with my laptop, and manipulate (or be manipulated by) these visual distractions and bookish fragments, I wondered whether I was posting and collecting photographs as a substitute for living. Was I, in Sontag’s words, merely “looking at” instead of actively “participating in” life?
Part of me wants to shrug off all these questions. After all, I’m still here trawling the Internet for more photographs and posting them on my blogs. Besides, as T. S. Eliot writes in “Burnt Norton” (from Four Quartets), “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” We all need our fantasies and distractions, our fictions and rabbit holes, our magical thinking. We all need to feed “the hungry eye,” as the title of the book on Walker Evans puts it. Overfeeding that eye doesn't always have to be such a bad thing. Escape isn't always a dirty word. In my darkest moods I’ve found relief, even glimmers of joy, by looking at the archives of other Tumblr bloggers. Their archives shimmer like mosaics of the most exquisite black-and-white photographs by Atget and Stieglitz and Doisneau; or technicolor gardens, skyscapes, and knick-knacks of good vibes; or a sublime fusion of poetry, painting, and photography (litverve); or scrapbooks pulsating with Marilyn Monroe's va-va-voom or "showcasing the beauty of John Lennon’s thighs." All these attempts to assuage what Sontag calls the “poignant longings for beauty.” But is it art? Is art therapy (or vice versa)? Or does photography (or blogging) always have to perform a noble task, spring from purely artistic motives, embody the loftiest aspirations of the human spirit?
I can see Ms. Sontag frowning on me now and saying, “But that’s not the point, my dear defensive amateur-blogger/photograph-hoarder.” Oh, Ms. Sontag, but sometimes it is. It’s precisely what draws me to a photograph or into writing. I want to be engaged in — or by — the ambiguity of these pictures, the urgency of these words. These imaginary conversations with people who challenge and seduce me into their ways of thinking and seeing. These people I will never have the chance to meet but can have the pleasure to read. Perhaps getting addicted to reading other people’s faces and thoughts — in photographs and books, via Google Images and Instagram, on blogs and social-networking sites — is part of that “irresistible” mental pollution. Call it art, therapy, selling out, or just passing time. These days, everything and everyone can exist in, or subsist on, a photograph.
[Photograph by dabacahin. That thing sticking out is the receipt for this copy I bought in 1985.]
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