On Sunday the great actor, Peter O'Toole, passed. I still remember the first time I watched "Lawrence of Arabia". I was in high school, already of uncommon tastes, certainly compared to many I knew. When this movie came on, I sat in front of the TV for four hours without moving. It was a movie without a single female character. Without any romance. Try finding that today. It had none of the silly token adds, unnecessary to the plot, and in some cases unrealistic, that cheapen a movie. These things were not what the movie was about. It was a romance of an entirely different sort. It was artistic. David Lean's mastery going so far as to ensure that every take (when applicable) traveled in the same direction - to the movement of the plot.

It was - and is - one of the most astoundingly moving films of all time.

A few years later, I attended the first of the re-releases in theaters. I was in Seattle. It was one of the most important and thrilling fairy-tale evenings of my entire life.

Yes, the superlatives come out in this description. In rare instances such as these they are warranted.

Mr. O'Toole has many other wonderful films that affected me greatly and in some ways so profoundly that I cannot even share it here. But I thank him. Recently, his speech at the end of "Ratatouille" furnished a stunning ending to a so-so film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JPOoFkrh94&feature=share

Dear Peter, you will not be missed entirely because you will always be with us. Your transcendent voice, bright eyes, and quirky smile will be with me always.

There are people who don't even know who he is. Who have never watched one of his movies. Who find him over-done and mawkish. Who don't understand why he is called the "Great Player". Who will never appreciate his magic.

I am not one of those people.

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged...to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing - including...another person's pain or misfortune.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

~ Photo of genocide of Serbians during the Kosovo War; interestingly, this also brings up another phenomenon from this period (not over, is it? couldn't tell, could you?), what they are calling 'gendercide', that is the targeting of healthy males (reasonable tactic, I suppose, if you want to win, and are brutal enough to carry it out), and all of the resulting psychological and sociological damage that results, not to mention the desired effect of depleting the targeted population, now and for the future.

Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. Part of the horror...of contemporary photojournalism...comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph.

The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.

Even if incompatible with intervention in a physical sense, using a camera is still a form of participation...the act of photographing is more than passive observing...it is a way of tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

~ Famous Photo of Vietnam War, used to propagandize the brutality of the Vietnamese, in fact an instance of personal vendetta against someone who had already killed the other man's family; interestingly, the blog where I found this also called journalism, 'churnalism'. Example of how photos can be used to angle a story the way the press (and those in power) wants it to be angled.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers...Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged to gradually give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something.

Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Me, Dried Mud in Corrales, New Mexico

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

...Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing - which means that, like every mass art form,photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Arthur Rothstein, Car in a Duststorm, 1930s depression era

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity - and ubiquity - of the photographic record is photography's 'message', and its aggression.

Images which idealize...are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness...There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Equivalent series, Alfred Stieglitz