Yet by their very nature as photographs, these motion studies seem to squelch debate about the auteur status of the photographer before it has even begun. Only the “animal motion” studies are going to come to mind. She knows that of the four phases of Muybridge’s work she ticks off in illustrating her claim, only one phase will be known to most of her readers. Her citation of Muybridge, for instance, really loads her case against the possibility of the auteur in photography. You have to deal rather gingerly with some of Ms.

To be legitimate as an art, photography must cultivate the notion of the photographer as auteur and of all photographs taken by the same photographer as constituting a body of work. Even after knowing they were all taken by Muybridge, one still can’t relate these series of pictures to each other (though each series has a coherent recognizable style), any more than one could infer the way Atget photographed trees from the way he photographed Paris shop windows. here is no internal evidence for identifying as the work of a single photographer (indeed, one of the most interesting and original of photographers) those studies of human and animal motion, the documents brought back from photo-expeditions in Central America, the government-sponsored camera surveys of Alaska and Yosemite, and the “Clouds” and “Trees” series.

The very nature of photography implies an equivocal relation to the photographer as auteur and the bigger and more varied the work done by a talented photographer, the more it seems to acquire a kind of corporate rather than individual authorship. It makes sense that a painting is signed but a photograph is not (or it seems in bad taste if it is). photographs have their power as images (or copies) of the world, not of an individual artist’s consciousness. The deepest penetration seems to occur in the following passages: First, then, we have to remove the point of Sontag’s book from the wound it has made in its subject matter. Susan Sontag’s On Photography might have been called Off Photography, for “offing,” in the ’60s sense of committing murder, is what the book really intends to do. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), 207 pages.

Sontag susan on photography