[Leica] Sontag and Benjamin

[Afterswift at aol.com (Afterswift@aol.com)]

>Pedantic, self-important, at times so far off-base she wasn't even on the
>field.
>And yet at times so brilliantly insightful one cannot escape reading her.
--------------------------------------------------
I'll miss Susan Sontag because she had the courage to change her mind in her 
latest book about photography. She had a tendency of going to extremes, 
following her own logic to the end of the line.
But that's OK, like taking the trolley to its final stop, not knowing where 
that stop is. As she wrote she investigated the subject. And then, in time, 
she 
returned taking the opposite lane. 

But she wasn't all that original when it came to critiquing media 
dialectically. Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide on the French-Spanish 
border just 
before his group of refugees from the Nazis found refuge, wrote very deeply 
about photography, asserting that it didn't have the 'aura' of an original 
work 
because it was related to 'mechanical reproduction.' I think Benjamin was 
wrong, but he opened a way to think and write about photography from an 
intellectual (Marxist) POV. A well-known French philosopher, whose name 
escapes me now, 
wrote a little book taking the opposite tack on photography, using a small 
photo of his mother as a child to evoke her reality. On these long, cold 
winter 
months in the Northern Hemisphere reading Sontag and Benjamin makes for 
enjoyable evenings. These books are in all the libraries. They can only 
deepen us as 
photographers.

Bob