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

Mr. Vonnegut, We Hardly Knew Ye

I first became familiar with Kurt Vonnegut in high school, where I wrote an extensive in depth research paper on his work (as preparation, I read literally every one of his books published up to that point). I have only recently realized how profoundly Mr. Vonnegut and his work have influenced my life. Without any sort of conscious plan, some of his favorite authors have become mine (Mark Twain, Louis-Ferdinand Celine); some of his favorite books have become mine (Journey to the End of the Night - but not Huck Finn). For a long time, his philosophical and religious views became mine - and some still remain. I only discovered any of this recently, while reading one of his autobiographies titled, Palm Sunday. Now I know that this exceptional man has been a mentor and friend to me for over 20 years. And it all started with Slaughterhouse Five. Mr. Vonnegut, we miss you.

Here are some of the points from Palm Sunday I found most intriguing (paraphrased):

Writers are always awkward in the world.

The best solution for our modern society is tribal togetherness.

Cinderella is the Christian Creation Story revised.