Sontag Quotes

I compiled a list of quotations from Sontag's "On Photography." The list is a

table in Microsoft Word, 24 pages long. Anyone may request a copy by emailing

me. bob at ackphoto.com

You are degrading this Forum by plugging your own collection of her quotes rather than discussing her ideas.

Nahhh...

Degrading this forum would be asking yet another what makes a great photo or when is a photo not a photo question.

Robert plugging Sontag quotes is merely as case not posting to the proper forum. Problem is I'm not really sure what the proper forum would be (general conversation) maybe.

I am afraid that twenty-four pages of quotes from Sontag would be more than I could take. I would likely have as much difficulty getting through them as I have had over the past twenty years trying to read 'On Photography'with minimal success. A few salient quotes that would condense her thinking, maybe, but not twenty-four pages. Something like the Reader?s Digest version. However, I must take off my hat to your dedication to the project. What wisdoms did you acquire as a result?

john kelly --

 

Wouldn't be the archer formerly known as jk -- would it?

Robert--

 

Thanks for dignifying this Forum by being so generous in spirit.

Robert，

 

Fred Goldsmith said well. Many people who kindly share are the reasons that I visit here.

 

Thanks again.

 

Ray

Hej, what's Sontag, anyway?

:... nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

 

Susan Sontag - On Photography "

 

Which graces the Nature Photography section under Learning here. It's pretty damn stupid, I think.

 

That's all I've read by her.

.. was good I didn't know.

<I>"It's pretty damn stupid, I think."</I>

 

<P> Care offer a thoughtful commentary, or perhaps it was just a little too much for you?

"Care offer a thoughtful commentary, or perhaps it was just a little too much for you?"

 

SS: "...nature has ceased to be what it always had been- what people needed protection from."

 

It is wonderful to know that hurricanes, tornados, or dying from dehydration off-trail are things of the past. And if it is not too much for you sp...,, our mortality.

 

"Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people."

 

See above.

 

Is there anything more obvious than human beings are nature? To effortlessly fall into the aporia is just plain intellectual numbness.

 

Nature always wins. Keep that in mind and you may be able to bear your mortality.

Either you're playing dumb or being overly simplistic. I'm quite confident the literal interpretation you've ascribed to her comments is not what was intended by Ms. Sontag.

Of course it wasn't intended. That's my point about intellectual numbness. The Sontag quote above is stream of banality.

Language is better when used with precision, but taking that too far can hamper an actual

discussion of ideas.

 

Political correctness is an example. It is better not always to use masculine pronouns and

not to make culturally biased assumptions. But sometimes it's just easier and more fluid to

say it quickly and not trip over oneself in an effort to say it exactly properly.

 

My guess would be that Sontag knows that man (people, if you will) is part of nature. Yet

most would agree upon a distinction between man and beast, between woman and

mountain, between child and planet.

 

It doesn't seem to me a stupid point to suggest than man's relationship to her

surroundings has changed over time. To an extent, we have grown more able to protect

ourselves from nature. At the same time, we are constantly reminded that human

advancement has limits and nature's power demands not to be underestimated.

 

I'd need a little more context to assess her thoughts in depth, and perhaps will be

stimulated by this to read more and comment later.

 

It doesn't seem outrageous to me for someone to suggest that now, more than in past

eras, nature (non-human nature, that is) needs protection from men, women, and children

. . . beer cans, hairsprays, and disposable diapers. Suffice it to say she is expressing a

change in dynamic. How intellectually careful she needs to be in making a distinction

between "shooting" and "taking pictures" and between approaching nature as friend or

enemy, I'm honestly not sure.

"It doesn't seem outrageous to me for someone to suggest that now, more than in past eras, nature (non-human nature, that is) needs protection from men, women, and children . . . beer cans, hairsprays, and disposable diapers."

 

The contemporary concept of "nature" is just that, something within our historical period (maybe since sometime in the late 17th century and speaking only within the western tradition). The delectation of nature-in-the-wild (meaning the absence of evidence of human presence) is very recent beginning maybe with the Romantics in the 19th century, although they celebrated its forceful wildness, rather than imagining weakness needing protection.

 

Nature is to be protected then from our presence in our time, not in nature's time. To speak from nature's perspective: everything tumbles down the wash, into streams and rivers, and out to the sea and to its floor, to be churned and returned in time. People, diapers, beer cans, trees, the Tetons, Delicate Arch, the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas, flowers, they all go down the same drain.

 

This is what has changed: our concept of nature, our peculiar sentimentalism (when it is not misanthropy), which does not stand against the 'literalness' of nature, its unimaginable energies and colossal timeframes, its grinding, implacable inevitability.

Honestly, you're writing is not usually this obtuse and it's hard for me to figure out what in

the world you're trying to say.

Sorry, should be "<i>your</i> writing."

"Honestly, you're writing is not usually this obtuse and it's hard for me to figure out what in the world you're trying to say."

 

Sontag says 'nature has changed'. I am saying it has not; it simply is.

 

and she writes: "Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people."

 

Iow, Nature is weak. We are powerful -- who has tamed it? Who has made it mortal? Who endangers it? Us monkeys?

 

I am saying Nature is powerful and we are not.

 

I am saying some urbane folks have gotten sentimental about Nature, and that attitude is likely to get you killed by Nature if you spend any time in it, or if Nature comes aknock knock knocking at your door.

 

Therefore what Sontag wrote seems pretty damn dumb to me, speaking as someone who spends a bit more time in Nature than Ms Sontag ever did.

I wonder if Sontag saying "nature has changed" is at all akin to our saying "the sun rises."

Most of us know Earth rotates.

 

Nature is more powerful than us. And we're powerful enough to have produced the atom

bomb and contributed greatly to global warming. Our impact is evident.

 

Context and perspective. Some survive in untamed nature and relate to it differently than

those who see it from a vista point. I live in the middle of San Francisco, where it knocked

loudly in 1906 and 1989. My being sentimental about walking hand-in-hand with a

partner along the Pacific's magnificent coastline likely won't make much difference as to

whether or not the next earthquake will kill me. Fires are likely each season. And still I

recycle as I know how much harm I am capable of causing, too.

Fred, it is for our benefit and in our interest to "protect nature". I understand and agree with that perspective. But in fact, nature doesn't need protecting from us. I used to live in SF in the 60s and 70s, and the past five years I've lived near Canyonlands and Arches, spending much of my free time off-trail. A place where a 100 million years of exposed strata is as common as rows of half-Romeo flats in SF, and if you can read the geology, a place of unimaginable ruin and disaster, where strata 50 million years apart in time meet on the same level, where strata are flipped over, the older on top of the younger, where the earth has been cracked through and pulled apart like orange halves.

 

When I take guests out for the 'desert experience' I ask them not to pick up any trash we may come across (although we haul out our own) because it has already become "nature", a plastic muffin container now holds water for birds and ground squirrels, an old (cowboy/miner era) milk glass Mentholatum jar holds a cryptobiotic soil colony. And most of all Nature is not a petting zoo, not a theme park. Nature doesn't care about you, no matter how much you love it. A Park Ranger here once said, "A frightened tourist is a careful tourist". Words, literally, to live by.

 

There may be a danger in the attitude I find in Sontag's sentiments, a failure to realize that things change and the verities of a few decades span can vanish into nothing when *we* change. We've been living rather comfortable and protected overall for decades. That may be changing. Live long enough to see it happen and the signs become obvious. This time next year the simple verities of recycling and "protecting" may sound hollow against the daily reality of housing, food, jobs, and money, but Nature will still be the same.

I work under the assumption that there is an environmentalist/feminist ethical

approach to our relationship

with Nature (the rest of Nature), one that divorces us from an

individualist/paternalist/anthropocentric way of

thinking that, albeit praiseworthy in this case, says "it is for our benefit and in our interest

to 'protect

nature.' " (These standards, I believe, can be extrapolated and applied to human

relationships and ethics as well.)

<p><p>

What if we viewed ourselves as participating in a system, the smooth operation of which is

a good in and of itself, without the necessity to overvalue our own individual interests or

rights?

<p><p>

Check out:<br>

Kenneth Goodpaster, <i>On Being Morally Considerable</i><br>

J. Baird Callicott, <i>The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic</i><br>

Karren Warren,<i> The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism</i>

"What if we viewed ourselves as participating in a system, the smooth operation of which is a good in and of itself, without the necessity to overvalue our own individual interests or rights?"

 

We do participate in a system, "nature". The problematic with biological nature for us is its flexibility; it is the essence of evolution, but our thinking is linear, rigid, and present-oriented to cope with it. No matter our actions, our impacts on nature, whether we judge them good or bad, nature incorporates them in ways we do not expect and therefore cannot plan for. I don't know what to do about that. More and better science? Perhaps. More environmentally aware social, political, economic action? I doubt it since it is where the problematic is generated, no matter we judge it "good" or "bad" action.

 

We can't make it a "smooth operation" if it means taking actions as if we are in charge and understood everything. Nature won't cooperate. It does things its way, in its timeframe. We have to accept that, and be wary of the unintended consequences of our "good' actions.

<i>"We do participate in a system, 'nature'.</i>

<p><p>

Yes. And I was suggesting we start viewing things that way.

<p><p>

<i>"We can't make it a 'smooth operation' if it means taking actions as if we are in charge

and understood everything."</i>

<p><p>

Yes. Precisely why, as stated, I lean toward actions we take and ethical considerations we

make with regard to Nature being divorced from an

individualist/paternalist/anthropocentric way of thinking.

<p><p>

Given the situation and the unknowns, we can do nothing or we can do the best with the

knowledge and perspective that we have. Our "best" may turn out not to be good enough

but it's worth a shot.

<p><p>

As for Sontag, I don't think she's dumb but I do think that one out-of-context quote is ill

expressed.

Why quote a pedantic fool?