Muybridge Shot Horses, Didn't He?

Susan Sontag wrote in her book On Photography that there is a relation between cameras and guns, at least at the level of language: we load cameras, we take aim, and we shoot. And beyond this direct involvement is a series of mechanical operations performed by the machine itself that produces a powerful result. The major difference is that cameras are not lethal, as Sontag (reluctantly) admits. But she does not go far enough to separate the destruction that guns cause and the creation that cameras make possible.

Likening the camera to the gun seems to suggest that we should not have that kind of power - the power to stop time, to freeze the flow of life, to extinguish that which is mysteriously alive. But the photographic process is much more passive. It may consist of the desire to consume, to possess, to contain, but it does so through a type of surrogate, a process that substitutes copies for the real thing. Contrary to certain religious fears, the camera does not rob the subject of its soul or inner force; it cannot, as it only records what is out there, external to itself and without crossing any physical or ethereal boundaries. Surely this is the opposite of death; a photograph of an object adds to the object and now there are two where there was once only one. At the very least the photographer's intention to preserve the subject must signal his or her repugnance for the destructive urge to kill and murder, if only for that brief photographic moment. Sontag calls photography a kind of 'soft murder,' but we might be better off dropping the death analogy and inverting the logic: photography is a powerful celebration of life. It enables us to view the world through the agent of light, and therefore brightens our experiences while teaching us there are other ways of seeing.