End of Innocence: Questioning Photography

     Susan Sontag, in her essay America Seen through Photographs, Darkly explores the evolution of photography in the twentieth century through Walt Whitman's vision of America as expressed in the publication Leaves of Grass; "If each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a  beauty, it becomes superficial to single out some things as beautiful and others as not".

     Sontag's argument, "To photograph is to confer importance.  There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects".

     A photograph from Edward Steichen's Family of Man.  Steichen is credited with being the first fashion photographer of the twentieth century as well as one of the highest paid. Later he become the Director of Photography for MoMa.  Sontag's criticism;"Steichen set up the show to make it possible for each viewer to identify with a great many of the people depicted and, potentially , with the subject of every photograph: citizens of World Photography all".

     Fashion photographer Diane Arbus took a different approach.

 

     Sontag's argument, "The Arbus photographs convey the anti-humanist message which people of good will in the 1970's are eager to be troubled by just as they wished, in the 1950's to be consoled and distracted by a sentimental humanism".

     "American photography has moved from affirmation to erosion to finally, a parody of Whitman's program".