Greg Lumelsky

Allow me to suggest that Sontag�s essay suffers less from platitudes and pomposity � though there is an abundance of both � than from a conspicuous but unsurprising failure to make vital distinctions, something that has been called moral relativism. A telling quote: �Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being? . . . And you feel naïve for asking, since the answer is, self-evidently, People do these things to other people.� Fair enough. But in her next breath she makes the inevitable (for her) comparison: �Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be humiliated, tormented.� Translation: the Americans are no more immune to the cruelty bacillus than the Waffen SS and Saddam Hussein�s jailers.

 

Having written the foregoing, Sontag demonstrates a perverse obliviousness to the not insignificant detail that Americans do not, as a rule, butcher hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and deposit their corpses into mass graves, or run concentration camps for the purpose of eliminationist genocide, or stack the skulls of political undesirables a la the Khmer Rouge, or engage in any number of other atrocities that America�s diseased and violence-impregnated culture would presumably (again, per Sontag) deem �good entertainment, fun.� Or do they? Pity, for Sontag, that there are no photographs, yet. A conflation of the Nazi genocide program, Saddam-era torture and the actions of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib obliterates the line between sadistic abuse for �kicks� and sadistic abuse as a prelude or sidebar to mass murder. Speaking photographically, that is the equivalent of failing to distinguish gray from black. Speaking generally, that is the equivalent of moral myopia.

 

I anticipate responses that take me to task for misapprehending Sontag�s thesis and that argue that her essay did not intend to place the depredations of American soldiers on an equal footing with the acts of Nazi police battalions and Soviet Gulag sentries. I respectfully disagree. Photographs, especially photographs used as a political cudgel, are not to be viewed in an ahistorical and amoral vacuum.

 

A non-sequitur: I look forward to reading Sontag�s next essay, the one that draws incisive conclusions about Iraqi society on the basis of photographs of the jubilant crowds preening for the camera as they hang the mutilated corpses of four American security contractors from a bridge in Fallujah.

Mike - I was reponding to an earlier prompt for a link to an article where SS had written that America "had it coming" on 9/11. If you are having trouble figuring out my point, I am going to have trouble explaining it to you.

See http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?010924ta_talk_wtc - seventh article from the top, or http://web.utk.edu/~mfitzge1/docs/312/312f02/sontag.pdf (same article). Pithy and to the point. But still garbage. Let's stick to photography.

I agree with Jemini's response. I use mine mainly for educating myself -- what I did when, and why one exposure setting worked while another didn't. I download my data into Excel, link it with MS Word via MailMerge and generate labels which I can then paste onto slide mounts. It's labor-intensive, but at the end of the day seems worthwhile.

Apologies in advance for the following crotchety rant.

 

I wonder whether any other users of Nikon equipment have noticed a

disturbing tendency at Nikon that I would very loosely describe

as �de-accessorizing�. What I am referring to can be seen to a degree

in historical perspective. For example, compare the accessories Nikon

released for its earlier Nikon professional cameras, the F-series,

with what is currently available for the F5 and the F100. Go back a

few decades and you will find an assortment of data backs, multi-

exposure film backs, remote and cordless power supplies and

viewfinders for each camera. The Nikon F alone had 22 interchangeable

focusing screens (according to B. Moose Peterson�s paean to Nikon,

the Nikon System Handbook). Little of this remains, and it needs to

be asked whether Nikon really thinks the F5 and F100 are all-singing,

all-dancing cameras without need for any additional functionality.

 

More examples of this trend and other lamentable omissions:

 

-- The apparent discontinuation of Nikon�s Photo Secretary

software (see http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?

msg_id=005FUL), an extremely useful learning tool that, in addition,

extended the capabilities of the F5

 

-- The failure to upgrade certain lenses, such as the 1981 28mm

PC and the 1974 (!) 35mm PC lenses, with a tilt mechanism (as in the

1999 85mm PC micro) or a �D� chip

 

-- Release of camera models, such as the N80, that do not meter

with AI/AIS lenses. Query whether this was a cost issue, since the

discontinued N70 did meter with these lenses

 

-- The introduction of �G� lenses without an aperture ring,

rendering them unusable in manual and aperture-priority modes on all

pre-1994 Nikon cameras

 

Some of these may be of concern solely for professional

photographers. Others might miff only the �luddites� who have not yet

traded up their F3 or FE2 for an F5, but who are experienced

photographers in their own right. Is the culprit market research that

indicates everyone switching to digital cameras in the next 10 years?

Is it a conscious neglect of older customers in favor of new ones? I

am interested to hear your views.