![]() ![]() As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. ![]() It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption-the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed-seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. Sontag delivers us to the dawn of this yet-unheralded art form when the convergence of chemistry, optics and, as it happens, botany, created an entirely new mimetic process. ![]() Her 1977 publication, On Photography, exposes the contradiction and complexity of this pervasive art form. From her warning on the falsity of metaphors as they relate to illness, to a rumination on the falsity of images as they relate to memory. ![]() Susan Sontag (Janu– December 28, 2004) spent her writing life placing a wedge of consciousness between our lazy collective actions and their implicit effect on society. ![]()
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