Reading- mostly Susaun Sontang

Fluidity of self/How society thinks about taking photos

Been reading a bit of Susan Sontang to try and back up some of my ideas in the Disposable Brighton project. I was interested in the idea that photography is all a construct; we take photos conditioned by our culture and upbringing and context, we take photos to try and show something depending on our culture/upbringing/context, and how the act of taking a photo now creates a new reality, a more "real" reality, SS says that photography is a "social rite/ a way to construct a portrait chronicle of oneself" (and you need only to think of facebook and the way that photos are now taken "for facebook", so everyone else knows what you are doing, and so that you can construct a personalised timeline of all the things you have been doing, and create a reality that belongs to you)- "people in industrialised cultures seek to have their photo taken, they feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs." This suggests a new change in photography, as a way to document and create reality rather than the older idea of recording it. It gives more control to the person photographing, but also suggests a dependency on the photograph to access reality, to prove that reality when not photographed is still as important, as interesting, as the parts of reality that are not. It also suggests a cross over between public and private spaces, which I will discuss later.
 Linking to this, SS says that "in pre-democratic culture, someone who gets photographed is a celebrity. Today, everyone is a celebrity, no person is more interesting than another." This links into the "individualisation" of society, which treasures the individual within the mass; identity is more important than utility. In line with this, the new technology of the internet has meant that people have more ability to construct an identity online, to choose how they are presented to other people, to have more ability to find and talk to others who are the same- and create communities- "instant history, instant participation."
This brings me on to the idea of public/private space. Before, public photos, as had been mentioned in a previous reading were "torn from their context", and have loose ideology. Private photos, existing in the home for us all, are much more rooted in meaning. With the rise of the internet, and the ability to photograph oneself and construct an image, the private images collide into the public sphere- many people post photos of family, couples, etc etc online, and others are see, comment, share etc. To Susan Sontang, this a bad thing; each photo is an example of someones "vulnerability, mortality", "to photograph is to violate, by seeing them as they have never seen themselves, to have knowledge of them that they can never know, turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed." And it is true, we never know where are photos go, where they are stored online, who see's them, if someone takes one and it becomes something else all together on a far corner of the internet. (memes?) In this sense, the private has divulged into the public. This, however, is seen as less of a problem than it might appear. People seem fine to "be photographed", and do not mind where their photo ends up, as long as it has "made real experiences". It is a "chronic vouyeristic relation to the world, which levels all events", and people care more about being shown than caring about where it ends up. It seems that once the photo has been taken, and we have an image of it, reproductions of the image, what happens to it means nothing to us.
With disposable cameras, this links into it- people didn't know where these photos were going, and yet they still interacted with the cameras; their image and self being "symbolically possessed" is not something they worry about, their fear of the public/private is not worrying. As our "affluent, restless, wasteful society", we feel that we belong in the public sphere, deserve to be there- "anything can be made interesting with the camera."
There is also the idea, which SS talks about, that "our junk has become art, and our junk has become history", photos have become artifacts, but their appeal is that they have become found objects, slices of the world"- this links into my idea. That junk cameras are now found and seen as important and good. These cameras are "found", and people choose to represent themselves in terms of how society thinks is good.
In all of this, my project will be an example of how people feel free to give their image, and how they choose to represent themselves in a certain way- They could have posed in a different way, could have taken a photo of anything, could have shown themselves- but because of the huge amount of images around, we think about what we're expected to take photos of. a sort of realism?

---> "realism is a social practise of representation, a normality which allows a strictly deliminated range of variations. It works by the controlled and limited recall of a resovior of similar texts by constant self -referencing anf cross echoing" "mutability which summons up the power of the real; a reality of inter-text beyond which there is nonsense" "subtle web of discourse through which discourse is enmeshed, a fabric of notions, representation, images, attitudes, gestures, modes of action which function as everyday no-how"