On Photography

“Melancholy Objects” explores Sontag’s final assertion in the previous essay that American photography is highly melancholic. She explores this melancholy through photography’s connections to surrealism and how the passage of time affects photographs. Sontag believes that time makes any photograph surreal, or hyper-real in a way that feels disconnected from the present. The passage of time allows people to hold and see the past in the form of photographs, immortalizing a person’s youth or suffering. Sontag compares the photograph consumer to the middle-class flâneur, who likewise tours places and experiences that aren’t their own in the world’s “dark seamy corners” (43). Time’s unique effect makes the flâneur-like experience of photography surreal by preserving past examples of wealth and poverty for current-day consumption as entertainment.

Sontag notes that two general types of photographers exist in relationship to melancholy; the scientist and the moralist. Scientists, like German photographer August Sander, want to catalogue, record, and document every facet of a particular aspect of reality through the camera. Sontag calls this a “pseudo-scientific neutrality,” since the photographers’ bias is always visible through how they choose to pose and capture their subjects. Sontag uses the photography of the FSA as an example of moralism. The FSA didn’t aim to catalogue rural poverty but instead to present striking, dignified photos of impoverished peoples in support of the New Deal. Sontag believes that both approaches are “imperious” and want to “appropriate an alien reality” (49) that necessarily doesn’t belong to the photographer. Sontag argues that American photography is more moralistic than in other countries because of the vastness of the US: The idea of cataloguing all of the US is unintelligible in the American popular consciousness. The moralism of American photography is a more predatory kind of tourism than Sander’s scientific photography since it proposes to show what’s “really” under the surface, thereby projecting the photographer’s biases onto reality. Sontag compares American photography to archaeological looting and preservation.

The American photograph archive is anti-scientific because it resists classification, cataloguing, and the typology of Sander’s photographs. Sontag holds that the focus on objects of transience, such as Coca-Cola products, is a form of extreme romanticism and thus melancholy. Sontag believes this happens because of accelerated, unfettered greed in the American economic system and the resulting excess of consumer goods that overtake everyday life. She argues that the place of photography in America is reactionary in the literal sense. Photography can’t instruct on or illuminate any subject; it simply reacts to and exaggerates the melancholy and “garbage-strewn plentitude” (54) of American society. She compares American photography to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the collector who tries to salvage history from wreckage or debris; in this case, the “garbage-strewn plenitude” (54) of American society. She compares the photographer to a gentrified version of Baudelaire’s ragpicker, an impoverished person who roots through city garbage for salvageable pieces of cloth. This love of kitsch signifies a consumerist society and locks photography into a position where it can only echo melancholic and romantic feelings without ever actually teaching people anything.