On Photography

by Susan Sontag

For Weston, beauty itself was subversive—as seemed confirmed when some people were scandalized by his ambitious nudes. (In fact, it was Weston—followed by André Kertész and Bill Brandt—who made nude photography respectable.) Now photographers are more likely to emphasize the ordinary humanity of their revelations. Though photographers have not ceased to look for beauty, photography is no longer thought to create, under the aegis of beauty, a psychic breakthrough. Ambitious modernists, like Weston and Cartier-Bresson, who understand photography as a genuinely new way of seeing (precise, intelligent, even scientific), have been challenged by photographers of a later generation, like Robert Frank, who want a camera eye that is not piercing but democratic, who don’t claim to be setting new standards for seeing. Weston’s assertion that “photography has opened the blinds to a new world vision” seems typical of the overoxygenated hopes of modernism in all the arts during the first third of the century—hopes since abandoned. Although the camera did make a psychic revolution, it was hardly in the positive, romantic sense that Weston envisaged.