What I found particularly interesting from this week’s reading was that Sontag identified the notion that the photograph is objective, where the drawing or painting may not be. The transparency of the photograph or frame is however not that simple, because, as she put it, photographs are still interpretations which are often drafted and thoroughly composed. This is further reiterated when discussing how the frame operates regarding perspective and focus and how the elements (lighting colour, composition etc.) work to define the way someone observing the frame sees it.

Not a lot is really transparent because the photographer has so much control – for example one of my fifty frames was of a treetop with the sky in the background. I had framed the image in such a way that the power lines were omitted from view. The photograph isn’t really comparable at all to what my eye could actually see, as I could just look downwards and see the power lines – the photograph was a complete construction.

The concept of Plato’s cave is fascinating to me – the artist can obviously manipulate the frame as to what they wish observers to see. This means that could either idealise the frame – on a small scale, by omitting the power lines I made my frame more ideal – or they can present only the negative, a less ideal point of view. The frame is very much a portal into not only what the image contains but also the artist’s perspective and their motivations. In this way I can see how photography, and artwork in general, is an ethics of seeing.

References 

Susan Sontag, ‘In Plato’s Cave’, In On Photography (1979), Penguin, pp. 3-13.