In Plato’s Cave Responding to Sontag

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29 March 2019
In Plato’s Cave
Photographs have various uses in the modern world. Artists use them as an art form to express and interpret their reality. People take photographs to socialize by capturing their truths, remembering the past, and influencing the future. In Plato’s Cave is the first essay in the book On Photography by Susan Sontag. In the essay, she compares photography to the word of Mallarme that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book; in the same way, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph” (Sontag 19). Photographs are such a powerful tool on how they influence people through imagery with a singular focus. Photographs represent actual objects, people, places, and events but are also a part of the whole truth and can be manipulated to give a wrong impression of the reality. This paper explores the Sontag’s ideas in the essay In Plato’s Cave and their relevance in today’s smartphone photography and social media.
In Plato’s Cave contains some of the best insight in On Photography. In this essay, Sontag explains photography in comparison with Plato’s cave. In the allegory of the cave, the prisoners' view of reality is limited to the shadows of the outside world cast on the inside wall of the cave. The shadows are the representation of only pieces of truth (The Republic of Plato, 1). According to Sontag, photographs are also pieces of truth as they only show a fraction of the whole depending on the viewer’s and the photographer’s perception. When people view a single image, they create an idea of the reality behind it through interpretation even without knowing the people in it or the intentions behind them. A photograph is a physical object that and a reflection of reality but also manipulation and mere image of the truth. People can manipulate photographs in many ways such as selecting what to focus on and the angle of the shot, but because they claim photographs capture reality, almost always people regard an image as the entire truth and ignore the fact that a photograph is an interpretation of what the photographer sees or feels. Sontag explains that in modern world photography has become many things: a tool of power, a defense against anxiety and an art form that is also a social right.
On Photography was written more than 40 years ago and some of the things Sontag said are evident in this era of smartphone photography and social media. The following quotes from the In Plato’s Cave show the relevance of Sontag’s ideas in today’s world. “Photographs alter and enlarge ou...