In Platos Cave Summary
In Susan Sontag’s essay, In Platos Cave, she describes photographs as appropriating our reality. This is similar to Plato’s idea that people’s reality is based off the shadows they see in their cave, rather than what is actually outside producing the shadows. Like these shadows, photographs give us a glimpse, or a “semblance” of knowledge, but they are not true knowledge; they are not understanding. Understanding is based on function, which photos don’t offer. Photos attempt to claim a reality, but they only deliver a sliver of it. With the development of technology, our society is saturated with photo taking. As a result, experiences are democratized. Taking photos has become a regular human practice. It is seductive and compulsive. No family, at least in westernized societies, is without one. To refrain from capturing images of one’s child implies indifference. We feel the need to freeze experiences in time, to immortalize them and give them importance. We capture “photograph-trophies” of our travels. By photographing an experience, it certifies it and makes it real.
Yet, taking out a camera and photographing that experience in turn alters it. It detaches the photographer from the experience and turns them into a passive observer. To photograph is to interfere with, invade, or ignore whatever is going on. The photographer aims to possess their subject(s) in their own image-world forever. As Sontag writes, “there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture”. Because of the pathos a subject gains just from it being photographed, photos have an interesting effect on the viewers as well. Pictures can incite nostalgia and reverie, desire, and moral impulse. However, the more one sees images that incite these things, the more numb to it they may become. The desire or shock they may have felt upon seeing a certain image for the first time may wear off the more they become accustomed to it. A photograph may help us flesh out the world, adding a thin layer of data to our database, making reality manageable. However, every surface has multiple meanings, and it’s necessary to look beyond the thin layer of data, and wonder “what the reality must be like if it looks this way”.
