Susan Sontag: a mulher que deu sentido a fotografia

Abro o jornal de manhã e, além, das notícias cada vez mais devastadoras sobre o tsunami no Oceano Índico, leio a nota de obituário de Susan Sontag, grande ensaísta americana, que revolucionou o pensamento sobre a imagem fotográfica na era contemporânea (entre outras coisas), leitura obrigatória para estudantes de arte e cultura, artistas, e pessoas inteligentes e esclarecidas em geral...

Descobri Susan Sontag um pouco tarde, confesso. Mas o seu efeito sobre como penso sobre a "imagem" não é menos efetivo. Há alguns meses fiz um post sobre ela na ocasião de um artigo publicado por ela na New York TImes Magazine sobre as fotos de Abu-Ghraib. Ao mesmo estava lendo "On the Pain of Others", livro maravilhoso sobre questões de ética e imagem no fotojornalismo. Vale realmente a pena a leitura.

O mundo da cultura e das idéias perde uma mente brilhante...

Como homenagem, o BoH inclui abaixo um pequeno trecho do livro "On Photography", publicado pela primeira vez em 1977:

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images.


To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

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