However close to reality a photographer gets, essentially he stays aloof, detached, distinct. Susan Sontag reminds us in On Photography (1977) that while real people are out there killing other real people, the photographer remains firmly behind the camera. Non-intervention is critical. She writes: “Part of the horrors of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of the Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayonetting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where a photographer has the choice between a life and a photograph, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who records cannot intervene.”
Posted on: Tue, 06 Aug 2013 14:12:09 +0000
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