Life and the Photograph

Under the directorship of Anne Cartier-Bresson, Objectif Paris exhibits a history of Paris from the Universal Exhibition in 1900 up to the present day as seen through the lenses of some of the world's greatest photographers.

Objectif Paris is a travelling photographic exhibition composed of 88 framed works sponsored by the Cultural Affairs Department of the city of Paris.

Photographers include Jean Auvigne, Marc Riboud, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edouard Boubat, Brassai, and Keiichi Tahara.

On the fate of the photograph, the late, great artist and philosopher Susan Sontag writes:

"Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced."

And so photographs, meant to capture and limit the death of a living moment, are themselves bound to decay. Sontag continues:

"Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them."

An inimitable consequence of the speed and limits of industrialization, photography has never simply been about the unambiguous exchange of a thing's reality for a thing's representation.

"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed," Sontag observes in her seminal academic text, published in 2000. "It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power."

This power, in turn, emanates from the photograph's ability to act as an index to life beyond the photograph - a semiotic grammar, Sontag argues, that is also an "ethics of seeing." Semiotics is the study of the language of sign systems and their meaning that photography makes plentiful use of.

Such an "ethics" is evident in studies of photojournalism. News photographers, now so attuned to the rhetoric of visual news, unintentionally "capture" the same framed image in order to illustrate a news event. Published across many different media, the photograph then becomes the news event rather than an illustration of the news as might be expected.

This is not accidental. It is precisely photography's ability to teach what is considered worth looking at that confers on the photograph, as well as on the world at its periphery, the values that come to be associated with it.

"Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph - seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects."

In war, victims photographed under the intense scrutiny of the press become unwitting components of a game of visual hierarchy, a game that sells newspapers, empowers a chosen side and supports those left at home watching from the sidelines. In the end, the subject, although centre stage, is thoroughly marginalized and forgotten.

While much can be claimed for the harnessed power of the photograph, Sontag concedes, its power is still constrained, to some extent, by the act and "truth-seeking" usefulness of interpretation.

"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."

And part of the inherent beauty of this interpretation is the ability of the photograph to make other parts of experience, often lost in time or obscured with memory, again accessible.

"To collect photographs," Sontag reminds us, "is to collect the world."

Susan Sontag (1930-2004) died December 28, 2004. Her biography includes works of fiction, The Volcano Lover and In America, non-fiction and academic essays, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls and Regarding the Pain of Others and plays, Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea.

A celebration of the history of photography in Paris, Objectif Paris, opens March 19 in the Culture & Art Exhibition Hall at the Capital Library of China.

Time: March 19 - April 12

Culture & Art Exhibition Hall

Capital Library of China

No. 88, South Dongsanhuan

Chaoyang District

Beijing 100021

朝阳区东三环南路88号首都图书馆文化艺术展厅

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