In her final publication before her death, Susan Sontag revisited her earlier (1973) deeply observant, but darkly negative, stance on photography, this time locating some virtues in the medium. At one point in Regarding the Pain of Others, when commenting on the relationship between photographs and meaning, she states that photographs “are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us” (Sontag 2003: 89). While she is referring here in particular to harrowing photographs of an atrocity type, all sorts of photographs can have this haunting quality. If a photograph challenges a spectator’s worldview, and a resolution is not ready to hand, the picture can linger in the mind like a ghost, exhibiting features similar to trauma. By watching a photograph, the action I focus on in the exhibit Watch This Space,” the haunting aspect of a photograph can be confronted.
In making her claim, Sontag accepted that photographs are hollow objects. It is only through the attribution of meaning that they become anything other than an apparition. But this idea of photographs haunting, of photographs not having an inherent meaning, goes against the grain of the everyday encounters people have with photographs.[1] In fact, when coming across photographs, viewers would be more apt to say that they locate meaning in them rather immediately. The saying, “A photographs can speak a thousand words” suggests that photographs absolutely have meaning, that it comes straight out of the pictures, that it is built-in, and what’s more, that meaning emits itself from the picture. An anthropologist point out how that saying gestures toward the process of photographic meaning making that is so seamlessly connected to human predilections for cultural inscription, for finding meaning in the things that populate our world, that we don’t even realize we are turning something that is essentially just a thing, into something meaningful in our lives.
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