This week we had a lecture about photography theory and the tale of Plato’s Cave was used to raise some of the philosophical questions about photography’s ability to testify, i.e. represent reality. The story is of prisoners chained in a cave, and in such a way that they are unable to see or touch each other. They can only hear each other and see the surroundings of the cave, including the shadows cast on the walls from light and objects outside the cave. Because of this strange situation, the prisoners’ sense of reality remains restricted to these few elements: the shadows, voices and well, the cave. When one of the prisoners break free and leave the cave and realizes the source of these shadows and that there is a world outside the cave unknown to him previously, he is said to have gained true Knowledge (gnosis) of what reality actually is.
Where does photography fit in all of this? Sontag argues we are all living in a sort of cave where images bombarding us daily presents a distorted reality, a false world – and photography is the primary instrument used to create these images. For her, this is a problem. We must be visually literate, she argues, in that we must be made aware of all the artificial interventions in photography: editing, selection, titles, other images, cropping, context, etc. There is nothing natural or true about the photographic image. Sontag isn’t the only one who has questioned the ability of the camera to capture Reality. This debate has been picked up in every field that involves a camera: cinema, documentary, television, advertising and art.
I find the Platonic idea that there exists a Real World in which Real People and Real Objects inhabit and that we must strive to find it, raises some very interesting questions. Who is this ‘we’? Who are these ‘truth seekers’? In fashion photography, there are feminists (such as Naomi Wolf) who accuse the industry of ‘unrealistic’ photographic portrayals of female bodies. ‘Real’ women, they argue, do not look like that. The photographed female body is degrading, in the sense that it is presented as an erotic object and it serves a male gaze. What is Real then? And is it necessarily desirable to fill our world with images of ‘normal’ women? What about Lange’s image of the Migrant Mother – the image we all discussed in the seminars? Should we care if it was posed or if Florence Thompson was specially selected? If it does the job (of showing the poverty during 1930s economic depression), then why should it matter that it was ‘posed’? Without photography, how are we to see the Real in the first place? What if we live in the world of The Matrix? Who’s to say Plato’s cave is not inside another bigger, better Cave?