On Susan Sontag and how she changed my education

I've gone from reading only fiction to reading some non-fiction and being obsessed by it. In short, I've discovered Susan Sontag. For the last few weeks I've been reading her books on photography, and finding that they are actually very easy to apply to films and TV too. And as I am a student of those two mediums, I now feel like I have a better or different understanding of what the media does in the world.


Sontag mostly talks about war photography, and how making an image is a contradictory thing to do. It is both trying to attract attention to what is happening and at the same time the person trying to get our attention on it (i.e. the photographer) is not doing anything. Sometimes this is due to inability but sometimes it also has to do with the need to capture the image and that need taking precedence over the lives of others.

Now, all this being said, the only reason this is something that I've been able to apply in the first few weeks of my studies is due to the classes I'm taking. We have been asked to make several short documentaries and we have been looking at detective TV shows. As I will be making my own documentaries, I've come to realise that ethics is something I will have to think deeper about and something I will have to consider in everything I film. As for detective shows, The fact that we are privy to a murder or other crime should bring us to question our own morals and ethics, even if the crime is fictional.

The deep thoughts of Susan Sontag are still going through the world in her books, but also in the classes that are thought in Art schools. At least, just looking at the books my flatmate reads (she studies photography), Sontag is still extremely influential. However, in my course, we mostly talk about Bazin and Dryer, which means star and author theory. As much as I understand their importance, I feel like looking at what is actually on my screen might give me more. So Sontag gives me the tools to think about what I am seeing, even though the war is not real, and why I am seeing it. She talks about the reluctance of showing death when it looks like something we know, but our readiness to show it when it looks foreign. So we go back in time, or to a place we don't know or have a story that is almost impossible to create the distance we need to comfortably look at what is going on. But none of this is being said in my classes. None of this is learn from my lecturers. Instead Susan Sontag is saving me.