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January 11, 2010
As we have seen in an earlier post Sontag's early formalist position was that the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling.
Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. n a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”
What is missed here is photography's dual role in mediating both personal recollection (in the form of autobiography) and collective memory (in the guise of history) that can be linked to the quintessentially modern experience of a perceived loss of authentic connection to the past, which photography seeks to replace but cannot.
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