The ethics of seeing: Susan Sontag and visual culture studies

By Marc Furstenau

There are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

--Susan Sontag

I

In her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag returned to an issue that had captivated her throughout her life--the image, specifically the photographic image. Returning to the question of the photograph, Sontag offered some new answers, and revised some of her earlier positions, even reversing some of her central claims about the value, potential and significance of the photograph in modern life. She now approached the photograph from an explicitly ethical perspective, considering images of war and suffering, contemplating the "innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding--at a distance, through the medium of photography --other people's pain" (11). Central to her argument in the book is the claim that we can, even through such a medium, see the pain of others, that the photograph is a means by which we may witness, or may be compelled to witness, misery and suffering. (1) At a time when it has become customary to describe the photograph as a mere construct, as unreliable as any other medium of representation, when the photograph has been demoted from the privileged epistemological status it had enjoyed for so long, Sontag has made an impassioned plea for the need to acknowledge the enduring imperative force of the photograph. "Something becomes real," she insists, "by being photographed" (19). It becomes real "to those who are elsewhere, following it as 'news" (19).

Following events as 'news,' from 'elsewhere,' suggests a modern, cynical detachment, and Sontag's earnest formulation could sound naive, and her implicit plea to keep abreast of events, and to look for the reality of those events in their photographic representation, might invite ridicule. "It is easy," as John Durham Peters has written, "to make fun of the obsession to keep up to date with the news" ("Witnessing" 721). But while our relation to the events mediated by the complex apparatus of the 'news' may seem highly attenuated, this is no reason to feel absolved of our responsibility to stay informed. "We have to keep up with the world," insists Peters, "because we are, in some complicated way, responsible to act in it ..." ("Witnessing" 722). We have no choice but to act. We are constantly in the process of making decisions about what we do, and the context within which we make our choices is now largely furnished by modern technologies of representation and communication. This is not to say by any means that the knowledge provided to us by our various media technologies offers unambiguous guidance. Even live coverage of an event, the most direct means we have at our disposal to see at a distance, still keeps us at a distance. As Peters insists, even when coverage is live,

because it is spatially remote, our duty to action is unclear. We
find ourselves in the position of spectators at a drama without the
relief of knowing that the suffering is unreal. Hence the
'unfeigned uneasiness' (Hume) we face in watching the news. We feel
a gruesome fascination for trauma without the exoneration of
knowing that it is all an experiment in mimesis. We are witnesses
without a tribunal. ("Witnessing" 722)

We are all witnesses, even if our witnessing tends to take place at either a spatial or temporal distance. We are implicated, morally and bodily, in the distant events that we can witness. "In media events," insists Peters, "the borrowed eyes and ears of the media become, however tentatively or dangerously, one's own" ("Witnessing" 717). This is our historical condition. We find ourselves living at the end of what John Ellis has called "the century of witness," during which the mode and scope of our perceptive grasp of the world has been tremendously enlarged. "As we emerge from that century," writes Ellis, "we can realize that a profound shift has taken place in the way that we perceive the world that exists beyond our immediate experience" (9). The most profound consequence of that shift in perception, as Ellis insists, is that we cannot be absolved of our necessary complicity in the horrors of that century, we cannot be relieved of our knowledge of those horrors. "'I did not know' and 'I did not realize' are no longer open to us as a defence," he insists (9). We find ourselves in an altered and radically enlarged context of knowledge. While the nature of our knowledge of events may be complex, we cannot deny that we know. "We know more and have seen more of this century," writes Ellis, "than the generations of any previous century knew or saw of theirs. ... We live in an era of information, and photography, film and television have brought us visual evidence" (9).

Ellis and Peters are endeavouring to shift the analysis of media and mediation firmly back onto ethical grounds, by describing our role as witnesses, and by insisting on an acknowledgement of our consequent responsibilities. Peters explicitly offers the concept of witnessing as an antidote to the simplicities of media studies. "As a term of art," Peters argues, "witnessing outshines more colorless competitors such viewing, listening or consuming, reading, interpreting or decoding, for thinking about the experience of the media" (707). The concept's main virtue is its power to draw our attention to the relationship between seeing, knowing and acting, and to the responsibilities and obligations that accrue from our capacity to see at a distance. It also implicates us, as mortal, finite creatures, in the pain and suffering of others that we are able to witness, opening media analysis out to a broader domain of ethical significance. "Witnessing," writes Peters "as an amazingly subtle array of practices for securing truth from the facts of our sensitivity to pain and our inevitable death, increases the stake of our thinking about media events" ("Witnessing" 709).

Sontag's book, then, comes at a key moment in media, film and cultural studies, and she adds an important voice to a growing chorus of those endeavouring to increase the stakes in the analysis of audiovisual media. It comes, too, at a time when we seem to be increasingly weary in our role as witnesses, numbed by a constant parade of atrocious images, each reducing the effect of the next. Sontag begins her analysis by describing the "innumerable opportunities" for witnessing horrors that modern life provides. Her claim for the unique and enduring capacities of the photograph is balanced against the threats posed to those capacities by the flood of other images. "Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround," she observes, "but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has a deeper bite. ... In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it" (19). Sontag maintains that, n an era of nonstop imagery and information overload, the photograph still has the power to inform, to stimulate, and to shock; she insists that the photograph still has the means, the potential, to affect us, and even, perhaps, to stir us to action. This is not guaranteed, though, as the photograph itself is incorporated within the structures of visual overproduction. "In a world in which photography is brilliantly at the service of consumerist manipulations," writes Sontag, "no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can be taken for granted" (71). Within the context of consumer capitalism, shocking photographs are produced at an ever increasing rate, as part of the ongoing effort to stimulate desire. "The hunt for more dramatic ... images," writes Sontag, "drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and a source of value .... The image as shock and the image as cliche are two aspects of the same presence" (20).

The threat of the abundant image has been a perennial theme in Sontag's writing. In her elegy for the cinema, written on the occasion of its centenary, during a period she described as one of "ignominious, irreversible decline" ("Decay" 6), the source of that decline was entirely clear. "The sheer ubiquity of moving images," she wrote, "has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art and for cinema as popular entertainment" (8). A similar effect seems to be at work on the photograph. "Newer technology," she writes, "provides a nonstop feed: as many images of disaster and atrocity as we can make time to look at" (Regarding 96). Sontag begins her book with a consideration of Virgina Woolf's account, in Three Guineas, of the potentially ameliorative effect of photographic images of war. Woolf "professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of goodwill" (Regarding 6). But Woolf wrote, as Sontag notes, in 1937, at a time when "all photographs were novelties to some degree. ... Our situation," some seven decades later, "is altogether different. The ultra-familiar, ultra-celebrated image--of an agony, of ruin--is an unavoidable feature of our camera-mediated knowledge of war" (20). Despite its unavoidability, though, despite the sheer ubiquity of images, and despite the too easy shift from shock to cliche, Sontag describes the abiding moral and ethical dimension of the photographic image. While our knowledge of war, of the world at large, is "camera-mediated," this does not lessen our responsibility. On the contrary, camera-mediation actually enlarges the scope and extent of our responsibilities. As Ellis insists, "we are now able to understand how witness brings us into complicity with ... events: 'We cannot say we did not know'" (15).

Sontag's efforts to acknowledge such complicity are especially salutary now, as the scholarly analysis of images, particularly photographic images, succumbs to the easy discourse of image overload and saturation, and as the imperative quality of the photograph is steadily drained away. The epistemological status of the photograph is being brought into question. Photographs are described as opaque screens, barriers erected between us and reality. While the photograph may once have been a means of bearing witness, that capacity now appears to have been severely diminished. Considerable effort has been made recently to describe a fundamental change in the nature of the photographic image, and to chart a devaluation that has occurred as more, and more unreliable, images are produced. As they proliferate and multiply, the relation of the image to reality seems more and more tenuous. While Sontag acknowledges that there is now "a vast repository of images," she insists that we must still attend to the enduring and complex power of those images. "Let the atrocious images haunt us," she pleads. "Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function" (102). Against contemporary efforts to drain the photograph of its vitality, Sontag offers a paean to the life of the image.

II

Sontag's argument is in stark contrast to the growing consensus that recent technological changes, specifically the advent of new digital imaging technologies, have produced a fundamental transformation in the nature of images. The claim is now a common one. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, for example, in their introductory and influential textbook on visual culture, Practices of Looking, insist that, "[i]n the 1980s and 1990s, the development of digital images began to radically transform the meaning of images in Western culture" (138). The digital image is typically contrasted with the traditional photograph, the analog image, which had been generated according to strict mechanical and chemical processes, and which, as a result, bore a unique relation to the objects it represented. "Analog images," write Sturken and Cartwright, "bear a physical correspondence with their material referents" (138). They are, according to a now widely accepted formula, indexical, a semiotic status that had determined a specific epistemological attitude. "The meaning of a photograph," argue Sturken and Cartwright, "is thus derived from the belief that it has a referent in the real" (140). The "cultural meaning" of photographs, they write, "is derived in large part from their indexical meaning as a trace of the real" (140). Digital technologies, though, have now provided the means to generate images that may look like photographs, but which don't carry the traditional epistemological guarantee. "In semiotic terms," insist Sturken and Cartwright, "this means that the photographic image is produced without a referent, or a real-life component, in the real" (139).

Digital technologies, it is claimed, have made it even easier to produce and reproduce images, the effect of which is to threaten the integrity of images. "The value of a digital image," argue Sturken and Cartwright, "is derived in part by its role as information, and its capacity to be easily accessed, manipulated, stored on a computer or a web site, downloaded, etc. The idea of an image being unique makes no sense with digital images" (139). Yet Sturken and Cartwright are willing to concede that pre-digital imagery, what they call the "mechanically reproduced image," circulated within a similar sort of context of extensive production and reproduction, that it "gains its value through its reproducibility, potential distribution, and role in the mass media. It can disseminate ideas, persuade viewers, and circulate political ideas" (139). How the digital image differs, then, is not entirely clear. "The digital and virtual image," they argue, "gains its value from its accessibility, malleability, and information status" (139)--a definition that differs only in the addition of the quality of "malleability," which is, however, acknowledged to have also characterised pre-digital imagery. As they concede, "it has always been possible to 'fake' realism in photographs. Digital techniques have made it possible to build upon this ability to artificially construct realism" (139). Hardly a shift that would "radically transform the meaning of images in Western culture," as Sturken and Cartwright would have it, yet such a transformation is understood to have followed from the vaguely defined changes to the basic constitution of the image that digitisation is understood to have wrought.

The main issue that actually preoccupies Sturken and Cartwright, though, is not the altered constitution of the digital image (which they are hard-pressed to describe in any precise semiotic detail), but rather the inflationary effect of digital technologies, which are only exacerbating the already inflationary effect of the mechanical reproduction of images. Their opening sentence reveals the centrality of the issue of image inflation: "The world we inhabit is filled with visual images. ... In many ways, our culture is an increasingly visual one" (1). What they are endeavouring to describe, then, is not a new kind of image, but rather a seemingly endless supply of images, which they characterise as the central feature of the modem era. "Over the course of the last two centuries, Western culture has come to be dominated by visual rather than oral or textual material" (1). This is a highly contestable claim, but is increasingly common, and is typically prompted by a consideration of new digital technologies, which seem to presage an even greater and more extensive visuality. As we come to inhabit a world filled, more and more, by images, that is to say, by copies (and, in the digital era, by copies that are supposedly no longer distinguishable from "originals," as Sturken and Cartwright insist), we become increasingly anxious about the epistemological status of those copies. As John Durham Peters has noted, the copy has always seemed to produce a kind of "ontological depreciation." "The copy," he writes, "like hearsay, is indefinitely repeatable; the event is singular, and its witnesses are forever irreplaceable in their privileged relation to it. Recordings lose the hic et nunc of the event" ("Witnessing" 718).

Recordings, though, for Peters, include the latest digital images and the earliest written texts, and everything in between, all of which have raised the spectre of our absence from, and therefore our inability to confirm the truth of, or establish our proper relation to, the original event that has been recorded. "The deprivation of presence," writes Peters, "in one way or another, has always been the starting point of reflection about communication" (Speaking 36), a tradition he traces back to Socrates' critique of the written word in the concluding section of the Phaedrus, which he describes as "prophetic of worries about new media more generally, including recent tectonic shifts in forms of communication" (36). Claims for the overweening "visuality" of our era are merely the latest instance of such worries. W.J.T. Mitchell has summarily rejected such claims. "We do not live in a uniquely visual era," he insists. "The visual or pictorial turn is a recurrent trope that displaces moral and political panic onto images and so-called visual media. Images are convenient scapegoats, and the offensive eye is ritually plucked out by ruthless critique" (170).

III

Sontag had been a major participant in the elaboration of such a critique. The essays collected in On Photography, her most famous statement on the dangers of images, were the expression of "a very long-term interest," but they were also the "liquidation" of that interest; the means to cure herself of her "addiction" to photographs. "That hasn't happened, however," she admitted, shortly after their publication ("Humanities" 61). Sontag remained hooked on photographs, on the consumption of photographs, the fate she had seen for all of us living in industrial societies, which, before anything else, she argued, "turn their citizens into image-junkies" (On Photography 24). Our need, our hunger, for photographs, our craving to "duplicate" the world, seemed insatiable, constantly fed and fuelled by an extremely prolific system for the production and consumption of images. "Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs," she wrote, "is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted" (On Photography 24). And she was no exception.

The main consequence of the mass industrial production of images, for an insatiable and addicted citizenry, was the generation of what she called "mental pollution" (On Photography 24), which she insisted was slowly but surely despoiling our cognitive and conceptual environment, threatening our sense of reality. "Cameras," wrote Sontag, "are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete" (On Photography 179). Our desire for photographs of the world, which is derived from our sincere desire to know the world, inevitably and ironically compromises the very possibility of knowledge. "The attempts of photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality," she argued, "contribute to the depletion. ... We consume images at an ever faster rate and ... images consume reality" (179). On Photography concludes with a dire philosophical judgment. "The powers of photography," Sontag wrote, "have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals" (179). Sontag was describing an "imageworld," which we had come to inhabit, and where we could only, and at best, maintain an uneasy distinction between the image and the real world by applying a "conservationist remedy," stemming the tide of visual pollution. "If there can be a better way," Sontag concluded, "for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well" (180).

The conservationist remedy has not been applied, though. On the contrary, we have become, it seems, since the publication of On Photography, ever more profligate in the production and consumption of images, comprehensively excluding the real world from the one of images. Sontag's ultimate optimism in the face of our insatiable appetites for images, her hope that we could maintain a distinction between the imageworld and the real world by establishing an ecology of images, has been dashed. The inflation of images has only increased, and her worst fears seem to have been realised. It has become a truism of media and cultural studies that the unchecked inflation of images has produced a crisis of representation. In the digital era of hyper-inflation, the extent of which even Sontag couldn't have imagined in the 1970s, our sense of the distinction between the image and reality has, according to prevailing wisdom, been utterly destroyed. The image has triumphed, in a process described most famously and influentially by Jean Baudrillard as, "the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, in the minute duplication of the real" (141). The triumph, or the precession, of the image is widely accepted. It is generally agreed that we live now in the world of the hyperreal, the realm of the simulacrum, a virtual environment. We inhabit what the philosopher Richard Kearney has described as the "civilization of the image" (1). "Everywhere we turn today," he writes, "we are surrounded by images" (1), and these are not, he argues, images like we have seen before. Reiterating the Baudrillardian claim, he insists that there is a "fundamental difference between the image of today and of former times: now the image precedes the reality it is supposed to represent ... reality has become a pale reflection of the image" (2).

The hyperreal is, of course, as the prefix suggests, a realm of abundance, or of overabundance. It is characterised by an excessive production of images, and a consequent devaluation of the value of images. The crisis described by Sontag has only been exacerbated by the development of new digital technologies for the hyper-production and reproduction of images. It was, in fact, the move into the digital that Baudrillard described in "The Orders of Simulacra," a realm where, he insists, "[n]o contemplation is possible. The images fragment perception into successive sequences, into stimuli toward which there can only be instantaneous response, yes or no ..." (119). The cognitive or conceptual crisis that Sontag had foreseen, the result of the failure to adequately stem the tide of images, had, as far as Baudrillard was concerned, already been initiated. Today it seems as though we are fatally inundated by images. We are in the midst, it appears, of an inflationary crisis of immense proportions in the economy of imagery.

The crisis foreseen by Sontag seems, then, to have become acute, and her inflationary analysis has been widely deployed. Not only have images become devalued by their sheer ubiquity, but the digital technologies of hyperproduction have also fatally compromised even the most probative image, the photograph. We have entered what William Mitchell has described as the "post-photographic era." Mitchell explicitly deploys the metaphor of an economy of images, a "postindustrial economy of images, with superimposed processes of gathering and stockpiling raw materials, extraction, manufacture, assembly, distribution and consumption" (57). Mitchell quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had, from the optimistic point of view of the nineteenth century, seen the photograph as a reliable object of exchange, imagining "a universal currency of these bank-notes, or promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the great Bank of Nature" (in Eye 56). As a result, though, of the development of a late-stage capitalism that Holmes could not have foreseen, the economy of the image has been compromised by ever more prolific systems of production. In what Mitchell calls the "digital image economy, form has become even cheaper and more swiftly transportable than Holmes could ever have imagined" (57). Such prodigiousness has, Mitchell insists, pursuing the economic metaphor, undermined the value of the image, so that "the connection of images to solid substance has become tenuous:"

The currency of the great bank of nature has left the gold
standard: images are no longer guaranteed as visual truth--or even
as signifiers with stable meaning and value--and we endlessly print
more of them. (57)

Mitchell cites Sontag as among the first to have recognised this development, as having seen, in his words, "panoptic photographic production as a potentially sinister ally of the late-capitalist state" (56). In On Photography, Sontag had described a process of transference, whereby the image functioned as a site of ideological displacement. This process, though, would require a constant increase in the volume of images: "The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself," she argued. "The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images" (Quoted in Eye 57). Thus tethered to (late-)capitalist systems of symbolic exchange, the photographic image would inevitably lose its value, and, as Mitchell argues, digital imaging has only "upped the ante" (57), producing a radical and definitive crisis, stripping the photograph of any real significance. Mitchell detects "signs of ethical and legal strain," and argues that "the digital image is emerging as a new kind of token--differing fundamentally from both photographs and paintings--in communicative and economic exchanges. It demands new rules for structuring those exchanges." (55).

In the absence of such rules, the image seems to be running amuck, and enormous efforts are underway to describe and contend with what is widely regarded as a new and unprecedented reign of the visual. "Human experience," writes Nicholas Mirzoeff, "is now more visual and more visualized than ever before" (1). By "visual," of course, Mirzoeff means artificial, fabricated, simulated, unreliable. The relation between the image and reality has been severed, so that Mirzoeff makes a simple distinction between vision and knowledge, sight and belief, asking, "[w]hat are we to believe if seeing is no longer believing?" (3).

The severance of the image from reality is more or less taken for granted. "In the era of the manipulated, computer generated image," writes Mirzoeff, "it now seems obvious that images are representations, not real in themselves" (37). Postmodern culture, or "spectacular society," is defined by Mirzoeff as one that is acutely aware of and even takes pleasure in the purely representational (that is, the wholly false) quality of images. We have entered what Miles Orvell has called "a culture of the factitious. We have a hunger," he says, "for something like authenticity, but we are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile. And the facsimiles," he notes, "are all around us" (xxiii).

From such easy satisfaction, Mirzoeff is led to diagnose a conceptual crisis. In a world of vastly proliferating "ersatz facsimiles," populated by hollow and lifeless representations, where the photographic or filmic image has lost all referential power, where "the image no longer indexes reality because everyone knows they can be undetectably manipulated by computers," where "the virtualities of the postmodern image seem to constantly elude our grasp," in a realm of dramatically accelerated "visualization," this crisis manifests itself in the "global circulation of images [that] has become an end in itself" (8), producing astronomically large amounts of images which have little if any reference to anything other than themselves and their own process of production and reproduction. The immense capacity of this system effectively produces a literally inconceivable amount of visual information. "The extraordinary proliferation of images," argues Mirzoeff, "cannot cohere into a single picture for the contemplation of the intellectual. Visual culture in this sense," he insists, "is the crisis of information and visual overload in everyday life" (8).

While Mirzoeff, like many others, insists on describing postmodern society in terms of a crisis, and specifically in terms of a crisis of visuality, he nevertheless depicts the postmodern subject as possessing a "remarkable ability to absorb and interpret visual information," which he argues is "not a natural human attribute but a relatively new learned skill" (5). In an era of visual overload, that skill is being finely honed, but he does imply that it has its limits. Despite his somewhat surprising claim that visual processing is not a natural human attribute, Mirzoeff nevertheless has recourse to an anatomical description. "According to one recent estimate," he says,

the retina contains 100 million nerve ceils capable of about 10
billion processing operations per second. The hyper-stimulus of
modern visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present
day has been dedicated to trying to saturate the visual field, a
process that continually fails as we learn to see and connect ever
faster. (5)

What we are learning to see, though, is not reality but merely images. Or rather, as Mirzoeff insists, what we have learned to do is "visualize existence" (5). The image has become the dominant conceptual model, leading, in a rather puzzling formulation, to "the visualizing of things that are not necessarily visual" (8). Postmodern culture, then, is characterised by the "dominance of the image" (9), manifested by an apparently illegitimate expansion of the concept of the visual. While Mirzoeff is concerned to avoid the usual sorts of iconoclastic critiques of visual culture, he nevertheless sees the roots of our present crisis precisely in the overweening reign of the visual, in our generalised tendency to "'visualize" reality, or, paraphrasing Lyotard, to "present the unpresentable" (16). Once this becomes dominant, the threat to reality becomes acute. We are, in the various phrases he deploys, experiencing "the destruction of reality," or "the collapse of reality" (17); reality is being "taken apart," or "reconfigured" (18; 21). All the while, we become more and more adept at navigating the visual realm, while slowly becoming submerged in it. The kind of visual culture studies that Mirzoeff advocates is explicitly conceived of as a response to a crisis. "This crisis of truth, reality and visualizing in everyday life is the ground on which visual culture studies seeks to act" (22).

For Mirzoeff, then, our capacity to manage or to navigate our increasingly visual environment, is, paradoxically, a symptom of the crisis. We cope because we have to cope, developing skills necessary to inhabit an increasingly artificial environment, one that consists more and more of the sort of visual or "visualized" information that Mirzoeff describes. We are, in what James Elkins has noted is an increasingly familiar concept, "visually literate." This is, as Elkins describes it, "a Baudrillardian virtuosity." It is typically presented as the result of the notion that we are "living in a deeply, increasingly, and perhaps principally visual culture" (131). There is, as Elkins notes, "a large body of writing on the current state of visual literacy," which in one respect or another suggests that contemporary culture is preponderantly visual, and that it has consequently produced some sort of novel capacity for 'visualizing' and information and knowledge. But such 'visual literacy' has, he argues, never really been subjected to any sort of thorough analysis, and much of what is written on the subject, he insists, "is in the form of passing references and undeveloped assumptions" (129).

The most significant assumption is the founding premise, that ours is a somehow more visual culture, that we are immersed to some unprecedented degree in more visual information than any other culture has been before. One of the most outspoken critics of this view is W.J.T. Mitchell, who has rejected the notion as a mere commonplace, "a thing that is said casually and unreflectively about our time, and is usually greeted with unreflective assent both by those who like the idea and those who hate it" (173). He is unequivocal on the subject: "If visual culture is to mean anything, it has to be generalized as the study of all the social practices of human visuality, and not confined to modernity or the West. To live in any culture whatever is to live in a visual culture" (174).

IV

The ubiquity of images seems obvious, however, and there is some objective evidence that suggests that our capacity to produce images has reached unprecedented levels. According to a study by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, "the universe of photographs currently existing is close to about 900 billion" (Lyman and Varian). (2) That amount has increased dramatically since their first survey in 1999, with 150 billion more photographs being produced in the following two years, the result primarily of the rapid introduction of digital cameras. We seem, according to such quantitative assessments, to indeed be in the midst of an information explosion, and a quite considerable amount of that information is visual.

But Lyman and Varian also consider the circulation of imagery, noting that, "there has been very little history of the large mass of photographs being copied." Most photographs, that is, are only printed once (and increasingly not printed at all, but rather stored on individuals' digital cameras or on their personal computers). The number of photographs that are printed and then copied is, according to those who have estimated such things, actually quite small: "Kodak estimates that only about 2% of photographs are ever copied or modified in any way after they are originally developed." Lyman and Varian err on the side of caution, noting that:

there are no statistics to tell what percentage of prints developed
have multiple copies at the source. Thus, all original prints from
negatives are counted in the first category of original pictures.
Given this, the addition to the net figures of yearly photographs
through copies is fairly small. (Lyman and Varian)

The implication is that the vast proportion of photographs that are produced are snapshots--private, individual images, which are rarely if ever duplicated or modified, and hardly circulated. Of the 2% that are copied or modified, most of those are circulated in the public media of newspapers and magazines (and increasingly on websites). The stores of photographs are in fact difficult to determine. "The number of original photographs stored around the world," the authors write, "is not a widely reported topic. It is also difficult to calculate, given the differing levels of preservation" (Lyman and Varian). They do note that the two main photographic archives, Getty and Corbis, possess about 70 and 65 million images respectively, a very small proportion of the total number of photographs, of which an even smaller number are regularly or widely distributed.

It seems more reasonable, then, to conclude that our management of visual reformation, or at least of photographic images, is actually quite strict. Or to distinguish between at least two broad modes of activity-one, the quite prolific recording of personal and private experiences, and the other, the quite controlled and limited public circulation of photographs. There are, of course, many other more specific modes of use, many other ways in which photographs circulate and many other functions that they perform, but it is important to acknowledge that they indeed perform specific and distinctive functions, and to perhaps elaborate a hierarchy of functions.

Among the most important functions that the photograph has come to perform is as a means to witness. We have, through the photograph, been able to see individuals and events that we would otherwise not have been able to see. We have been granted an unprecedented degree of knowledge about the world, which has in turn determined a complex global network of responsibility and obligation. Photographs have not distanced us from reality. They have, quite to the contrary, enlarged and expanded our sense of reality, and, at the same time, they have contributed to the production of a complex and subtle context within which we have to make judgements and determinations about that reality.

For Mirzoeff, by contrast, "photography is dead.... its claim to mirror reality can no longer be upheld. The claim of photography to represent the real has gone" (65). Such bald statements, presented with an almost airy detachment, are common. William J. Mitchell has produced one of the most widely cited versions of this claim, and has established the generally accepted chronology. "From the moment of its sesquicentennial in 1989 photography was dead--or, more precisely, radically and permanently displaced--as was painting 150 years before" (20).

Given the provenance of such claims in Sontag's early and influential work on photography, one would assume that in her return to the question of the photograph she would find a certain qualified satisfaction. While her optimistic hopes for a distinction to be maintained between the image-world and the real world might seem to have been dashed, they are so for precisely the reasons that she had predicted, the unchecked inflation of images. In revisiting the question of photography, one would expect that she would join those who bemoan the breakdown of that distinction, and that she would join the various campaigns underway to elaborate new strategies for living wholly within the image-world, or for contending with the radical "visualisation" and spectacularisation of reality that has supposedly occurred.

Instead, though, we find something entirely different. The question, it seems, had become clearer for her, and the issue at stake was plain. Of all the things that photographs could do--and they can do many things--of all the various capacities of the photograph that she had described, they first, and most importantly, "bore witness to the real" (Regarding 23). This is, as I have been endeavouring to show, an unfashionable way of thinking about the photograph, at odds with the now common claim that "the photograph is no longer an index of reality" (Mirzoeff 88-9), or that "images are no longer guaranteed as visual truth" (Mitchell 57). Sontag chose to return to the question of the photograph, in the era of the digital image, and in the face of the hyperinflation of increasingly unreliable imagery, by considering the reliably forceful images of war, suffering and carnage, of disaster and atrocity, and by asking what one must do in the face of these images--by considering, that is, the enduring relation between the photograph and reality, and the ethical implications of this relation.

Sontag accepts that such a relation persists, and that photographic images continue to affect us. Even in an era of visual profligacy, when photographs are produced in astronomical quantities, they retain their force, a fact that Sontag accepts partly because she has seen no proof to the contrary. "What is the evidence," she asks, "that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?" (94). She admits that she had once thought this to be so, that she had argued that, "while an event becomes more real than it would have been had one never seen the photographs, after repeated exposure it also becomes less real" (94)--a position that had forced her to advocate an "ecology" of images, in order to ameliorate the photograph's propensity to "consume reality" (180).

Sontag's originally skeptical position was clearly signalled in the first sentence of On Photography, where she insisted that we were lingering "unregenerately in Plato's cave, still revelling ... in mere images of the truth" (3). The photographic image kept us apart--from the world, from reality, from each other--an effect that was only intensified by being able to so easily take photographs. This had established "a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events" (11). There was, for Sontag, a clear and unambiguous distinction between the world and the image-world, the former a realm of action and consequences, the latter a quietistic realm of mere looking. Worse, the photograph has subordinated the moral imperative to intervene in the world to the now more important task of memorialising events and individuals, of taking pictures. "The omnipresence of cameras," she argued, "persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself--so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. ... Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention" (11).

This was the cost of remaining, "unregenerately," in Plato's cave. Living in a world of images, in an image-world, necessarily precluded moral improvement and ethical action. The act of photographing was understood as an effectively conservative gesture. Not merely "passive observing," the act of photographing is

a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever
is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an
interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining
unchanged.... to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject
interesting, worth photographing--including, when that is the
interest, another person's pain or misfortune. (On Photography 12)

The Platonic metaphor is a hardy one, and is deployed with particular emphasis today, in the era of digital imagery. We are told, for instance, that whatever tenuous faith or confidence we may have had in photographic imagery, "the emergence of digital imaging has irrevocably subverted these certainties. ... We have indeed learned to fix shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave" (Mitchell 225). The primarily constructed nature of photographs, which Sontag had also insisted upon, is even more acute now, so that even her sensitivity to the ambiguous tension between the photograph's status as record and as culturally constructed artefact seems no longer possible to sustain. "Although there is a sense," wrote Sontag, "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" (On Photography 6-7). In our era, the "post-photographic" era, even this minimal distinction between the photograph and the drawing is understood to have been destroyed.

In the era of the digital image, however, Sontag insists upon the enduring distinction between the photograph and tile drawing, between subjective accounts of the world and those produced by an automatic recording apparatus (filmic or digital). But she has insisted that it is not an easy distinction; moreover she does not automatically accept that one is necessarily more effective than the other. She does, though, acknowledge and accept that for all their complexities, photographs have become precious and important things, that they are a significant phenomenon, put to use by millions, perhaps billions, of people in their unending efforts to grasp the complexities of the world. Her task is to force us to consider both what we can and what we must do in the face even of the complex, unreliable and uncertain evidence of the photograph. It is not perfect evidence, it is not irrefutable evidence. "The photographic image," she acknowledges, "even to the extent that it is a trace ... cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened" (Regarding 41). Moreover, it has always been, and will always be, amenable to distortion. She makes only a passing reference to digitisation in the book, noting, simply, that "fiddling with pictures long antedates the era of digital photography and Photoshop manipulations: it has always been possible for a photograph to misrepresent" (Regarding 41).

Such a possibility is so obvious as to require little further consideration. What we must do, instead, is attend to the otherwise incontrovertible facts that photography has provided and continues to provide. These, however, like any other facts, are then put to use in specific social contexts, performing always unpredictable and unaccountable functions. Nothing can fix or delimit those functions. Photographs are the property not of those who make them, but of those who consume them. "The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph," she insists, "which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it" (Regarding 35). It is those communities, those many and diverse communities, with whom Sontag finds affinities, taking seriously their attachment to and their dependence upon the photographic image. She contrasts this with the more common dismissive attitude, which she had once shared, and which finds such attachment naive or simplistic. Against those who would try to disabuse us of our faith, albeit our troubled and conflicted faith, in the photographic image, Sontag honours it by taking it seriously.

In the clearest and most impassioned passage in the book, Sontag rejects those for whom images are mere spectacles, or who argue that what we can see by means of photographic imagery only appears to be real. Her own central claim in On Photography is first of all clarified and modified. Her argument, she explains, had been "that our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images" (Regarding 97). She has now dispensed with any hope for an ecology of images. This has become a common plea, she says, "[b]ut what is really being asked here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? [T]hat we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an 'ecology of images'? There isn't going to be an ecology of images. No committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate" (96-7).

It is this last fact that we must reflect upon most carefully. As long as there are horrors in the world, we will be provided with images of them. We will not, that is, be allowed to ignore those horrors, nor say that we did not know about them. What we will have to do is continue to contend with the representation of horror, and, more generally, with the fact that our knowledge of this and much else about the world is provided to us in the form of photographic imagery. The challenge, for Sontag, is not to allow the complexities of photographic representations to be our escape from the need to confront the horrors of the world. The critique that she had elaborated in On Photography was, in her words, a "conservative critique," conservative "because it is the sense of reality that is eroded. There is still a reality that exists independent of the attempts to weaken its authority. The argument," she notes significantly, "is in fact a defence of reality and the imperilled standards for responding more fully to it" (Regarding 97).

A more radical and, she insists, more cynical, version of this argument has circulated, the argument that "there is nothing to defend: the vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images. ... Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media" (Regarding 97). But reports of the "death of reality," she notes, "seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture" (Regarding 98). Sontag's response to this version of her own argument is unequivocal:

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking
provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small,
educated population living in the rich part of the world, where
news has been converted into entertainment--that mature style of
viewing which is a prime acquisition of 'the modern', and a
prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based
politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that
everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that
there is no real suffering in the world. (Regarding 98-9)

Against this disenfranchising and effectively disabling discourse, Sontag offers a common-sense and sympathetic observation: "There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality" (Regarding 99).

V

The scholarly study of images has reached a crucial juncture, with the elaboration of a cross-disciplinary domain of analysis, with the designation of a field of "visual culture." The risk at this moment, as W.J.T. Mitchell has so cogently argued, is that the "visual" will become conceived of in terms so broad as to be practically meaningless. Worse, the object of analysis then becomes "the image," in some vaguely articulated sense, rather than our engagement with images and what we make with images. When our era is described, in the anodyne terms of visual culture studies, as "predominantly visual," when we are informed that our world is "filled with visual images," and that visual culture is, in Mitchell's paraphrase, "fundamentally about the social construction of the visual field," which consists of "scopic regimes and mystifying images to be overthrown by political critique" (170), then we run the risk of making the image responsible rather than ourselves. "The political task of visual culture," insists Mitchell, "is to perform critique without the comfort of iconoclasm" (170). Sontag has offered an exemplary instance of a non-iconoclastic critique of our visual culture. Her main object is to counter "two widespread ideas--now fast approaching the status of platitudes," the elaboration and proliferation of which she herself had played a key role in. "Since I find these ideas formulated in my own essays," she writes, "I feel an irresistible urge to quarrel with them" (Regarding 93). The first of these instances of received wisdom is that "public attention is steered by the attentions of the media--which means, most decisively, images" (93); the second, "that in a world saturated, no, hyper-saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect: we have become callous" (93-4). Sontag's quarrel with these ideas, her efforts to imagine the plurality of responses to images, and to avoid the callous dismissal of what we see in photographs, should be taken up by those defining the field of visual culture. It must be acknowledged that, far from being diminished, images matter more now, perhaps, than ever.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Elkins, James. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Ellis, John. Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.

Kearney, Richard. The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Lyman, Peter and Hal R. Varian. "How Much Information", 2003. Retrieved from http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/ how-much-info-2003 on 17 June 2006.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994.

Mitchell, W.J.T. "Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture." Journal of Visual Culture. 1.2 (2002): 165-181.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Memoirs of the Artist." The New York Review of Books. 54.1 (January 11, 2007): 19-20.

Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1989.

Peters, John Durham. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1999.

--. "Witnessing." Media, Culture and Society. 23.6 (2001): 707-723.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1977.

--. "Photography Within the Humanities." The Photography Reader. Ed. Liz Wells. London: Routledge, 2003.59-66.

--. "The Decay of Cinema." New York Times Magazine. (February 25, 1996): 6-10.

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Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Notes

I would like to thank Christine Straehle for our many discussions about ethics and images.

(1) Shortly before this article went to press, Annie Leibovitz, Sontag's longtime companion, published a memoir of the years 1990 to 2005, with many photographs of Sontag, including several of her in the hospital in the last days of her life. In a review of the book, and of the accompanying exhibition that was held at the Brooklyn Museum, Joyce Carol Oates wonders about the rights of those whose pain and suffering is represented. Leibovitz's photographs struck Oates as "needlessly unsparing, taken at a time when the subject can scarcely have been aware of the photographer's presence, and could not have given permission" (20). Oates comments should be read, though, in light of Sontag's own last thoughts on the ethical complexities of just such "unsparing" imagery and the rights of such subjects.

(2) This is calculated to be equivalent to 4,500 petabytes, or 4.5 exabytes (a billion gigabytes) of information. To give some indication of scale, the group has estimated that over the span of recorded history, to 1999, when they conducted their first survey, human beings had managed to produce 12 exabytes of stored information. We are, they estimate, now producing information at a rate of about 1 to 2 exabytes a year.