High Regard: Words and Pictures in Tribute to Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag's death on December 28, 2004, was marked, unsurprisingly, by an immediate outpouring of thoughtful memoirs and obituaries. Turning from words to pictures, the surprising tributes came later: Annie Leibovitz's book, A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005, and last year's Metropolitan Museum of Art show, On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag, which ran from June 6 to September 4, 2006. Leibovitz's book opens with a picture of Sontag, back to the camera, dwarfed by the rock walls of Petra but emerging into the white open space before the temple. Leibovitz explains that she came across the photograph while searching through her files for pictures to include in a booklet she was making for Sontag's memorial service. Encountering the pictures she had taken in their fifteen years together, Leibovitz ended up with a book in addition to the memorial booklet. Although the book follows the time line implied by the title, with her opening picture, Leibovitz breaks chronology for Sontag's sake. She justifies the exception by explaining that "the picture sounds the themes of death and grief that wind through the book," but it also captures Sontag's "appetite for experience."¹

Metropolitan Museum curator Mia Fineman in turn visited Leibovitz's studio before the book was finished and chose this same photograph to include as the last image to exhibit (fig.1). (Leibovitz donated it to the museum.)² In contrast to Leibovitz's factual caption ("Susan Sontag, Petra, Jordan, 1994") and intimate narrative, the wall text in the Metropolitan's exhibition gives the theory: "A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie." Quoted from Sontag's On Photography,³ this wall text, like all the texts in the exhibit, was selected by curator Fineman from Sontag's repertoire of writings on photography.

Figure 1.

Annie Leibovitz (American, born 1949). Susan Sontag, Petra, Jordan, 1994. Gelatin silver print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the artist, 2006 (2006.236) © Annie Leibovitz.

The show featured more than forty photographs drawn from the Metropolitan's collection juxtaposed with wall text. (Unfortunately, there is no exhibition catalog.) This tightly focused exhibition cleverly engages with one of Sontag's major themes: her career-spanning preoccupation with the modern relationship between words, pictures, and experience. Sontag began publishing essays about photography in the New York Review of Books in 1973; these essays would become 1977's seminal On Photography, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. Her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), underscores the moral issues raised by the medium, as does one of her last published essays, a May 23, 2004, cover story on the Abu Ghraib photographs for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Sontag's interest in the medium, then, raises questions not only about the value of photography as an aesthetic experience but especially about the moral values and ethical obligations of looking. What should a photographer's images do? More pressing still, what do they do? What should a writer's words about photographs do? Can an appropriately worded caption prevent photographs from dulling the senses and blunting the capacity for outrage and indignation? "All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions,"⁴ Sontag asserted, so in this exhibition, Sontag's own words about photography put the assertion to test.

The words on the wall command special attention not only because their illustrations are now supplied or suggested but also because they reveal or reinforce Sontag's epigrammatic and imperative prose style. The short declarative sentences repeatedly link an abstract noun (such as "photography") with a vivid verb—"Photographs furnish evidence"—for example.⁵ No equivocations or references to...