Matthew Mills

Susan Sontag From on Photography. New York: Delat Books, 1977,pp.3-24

Analysis

Susan Sontag’s analysis of Plato’s cave looks into the details of the ideology of blissful ignorance. This is the overall idea of Plato’s cave, which explains the idea of prisoners being forced to watch shadows until they see them as reels. This idea is changed when one of the prisoners is released and shown the world for what it is; however, when he returns, the others don’t believe him and violently attack his view. This is the overall idea of Plato’s cave. 

In Sontag’s analysis, she looks deeper into this idea, using photography as her basis. This leads down an unusual path. “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still revelling in its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” This quote looks at the idea of humankind as a general idea in 1977. This view that Sontag is explaining is the idea of people’s understanding of the real form or truth of an image or artist’s piece. “But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images.” This further expands what she is explaining about how education can always change the views of the mass population.

“To collect photographs is to collect the world.” The idea behind this is to explain the importance and value of photographs and the view that they are the truth and show what it is for how it is in that singular moment. This is followed by “Movies and television programmes 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, and store.” This then both furthers but contradicts what has been first stated. It shows the almost valuelessness of movies and television programmes but explains how images can be lightweight, cheap, and easy to reproduce. This also might show the lack of value that images have because of their ease of replication and portability, causing them to lose some of their fundamental integrity. This idea would also become more important as social media becomes more “fake” and generated by people using enhancements and changing themselves, and the images that they have taken show the effort to look perfect for the societal image of life.

The image of life has changed due to social media, but the “age-old habits” that Sontag explains still carry meaning because of the pressure of modern living. This is then looking back to the fundamentals of Plato’s cave because of the closed-mindedness of what people accept and look for. The link back to this with the work Sontag has written is looking at the ways she explains the lack of value inside of movies and TV programmes and the way they “flicker and go.” This is in a similar way to looking at trending images inside of Instagram and the way they load and change almost instantly as the next “in thing” pushes the last one out.

Sontag’s explanation shows a deep level of change from Plato’s cave; however, the idea still lingers. This is in the same way that her fundamentals still explain today’s society when diving into what is meant by the text. This text would be extremely different if it were rewritten today; however, the basic parts would stay the same, as the human aspects of “fitting in ” haven’t changed over the years, and mainstream ideology has changed platforms but not the idea itself.

References

Susan Sontag From on Photography. New York: Delat Books, 1977,pp.3-24