The Work of Nostalgia in the Age of Instagram

Following the insights of the German critic Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag once observed that photographs acquire the aura of a work of art by their own visible deterioration. With the advent of mechanical reproduction, artistic images had broken free of the aesthetic regime which once made their value synonymous with their singularity as works of art. No longer context bound, any image can be cropped and made adjacent to any other image. For Sontag, writing in the 1970s, photographs and reproduced images had become so common that they had developed their own type of aura: that of the vintage photograph.

That same aura, the aestheticization of decay and deterioration, is perhaps even more recognizable in its current manifestation on Instagram. With its clear focus on the now, digital photo-sharing has had to evolve in order to accommodate the nostalgic desires of its users. Echoing Sontag’s observation about the acquired aura of the faded photograph, we select from a range of vintage-style filters before posting pictures for the eyes of our Instagram followers. Nathan Jurgensen, writing for The New Inquiry, argues that the filters are a way of coping with the overabundance of images that typifies social medial. It’s a way of convincing ourselves that our photographs are just as worthy of nostalgia as if they belonged to a finite archive from the past. As artificial memory storage becomes more efficient, we are producing more than most of us would deem worth remembering. But this overabundance has not curbed our appetite for images.

Instagram’s filters are meant to instil a sense of nostalgia for the present, a condition of scarcity that digital photography has long surpassed. But, as Jorgensen writes, “Merely making your photos evocative of photo scarcity doesn’t make them actually scarce or make others covet them.” Snapchat, by contrast, he argues, is built upon the idea of real scarcity, where images and videos, once the viewing has started, exist up to ten seconds before disappearing forever. No external memory, no archive. A singular aesthetic experience.

A year before Sontag’s first essay on photography was published in The New York Review of Books, John Berger’s influential documentary about the history of European Art, Ways of Seeing, aired on the BBC. Like Sontag, Berger was deeply indebted to Walter Benjamin’s writing on art and sought to provide his audience with the means to connect the art of the European tradition with contemporary media, advertising, and power structures. Equally impressed with the way images seemed to saturate modern life, Berger argued, “In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.”

Not surprisingly, Berger’s work has also inspired some timely reflections on the aesthetic discourse of Instagram. In his article “Ways of Seeing Instagram” the art critic Ben Davis begins with a Google trend chart showing that “Instagram” has eclipsed “art” in terms of popular searches. Photosharing on Instagram (or, for that matter, Tumblr, Pintrest, even Flickr) has become a dominant way of seeing, and like all ways of seeing reflects certain social interests. The tradition of oil painting, observed Berger, could credit its subjects (nudes, fruit, and other commodities) to the presentation of a privileged, often opulent lifestyle. The continuities between advertising photos and still lifes, between classical nudes and pin-ups, are laid bare. Despite differences of social and historical context, Davis, like Berger, draws out the similarities between the art Berger works to demystify and the various genres of Instagram photos. Although current technologies have seemingly democratized the image-making that used to exist only at the behest of aristocrats, Davis argues, “images retain their function as game pieces in the competition for social status.”

But social status comes in many forms. It isn’t all just fine dining and selfies. Having a past worth sharing, and a past that’s accessible through other processes of archiving, is what many of us are now flaunting on Instagram. And we do so on a weekly basis. Nostalgia has finally been reconciled with Instagram’s presentism in the form of the hashtag, throwback Thursday (#tbt). The hashtag has existed for over a year, but it’s only recently become a constant in the feeds of our friends and followers. The #tbt image can come in any format, though the proper distance between the image and its posting date remains a mildly contentious topic. For me, and likely for most of my generation, the most enjoyable images tend to be those of old photographs rephotographed. The past returns again, and I don’t have to wait for someone’s wedding slideshow to see their pubescent class photos or an unself-conscious work of art from elementary school. For those who started snapping photos during the internet age, Throwback Thursday is another chance to mine the recent past for a flattering photo; for the rest of us, it’s an opportunity to reassert the aura of an old photo that hasn’t yet been digitized.

I can’t say I dislike seeing the young faces of my friends crop up on my Instagram feed. Bad haircuts, awkward family photos, and the like. And despite the well-publicized “rules” for how one should participate in #tbt, I was also sort of impressed when I saw Barack Obama tweeted, “Throwback to last week when a woman—not her boss—made her own decisions about her health care. #TBT”. The past has its uses. Even a form whose sole purpose is nostalgia can be a way of politicizing the past. More than anything, though, Throwback Thursday reflects a collective sense of nostalgia that runs deep enough to be ritualized, a way of remembering that isn’t likely to be forgotten, whatever the future brings.

Sontag, again

Since reading Susan Sontag's On Photography several months ago, I've had some opportunity to engage with more fully with a few of its ideas. One of the fruits of this engagement is a comic I drew for Whether, an online magazine that was launched earlier this summer by some friends of mine. I've also managed to read through Sontag's unofficial sequel to On Photography, which ended up being the last book she published during her lifetime.

In 2003, a year before she passed away, Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others, a short book based on her 2001 Oxford Amnesty Lecture. The book's focus is on war photography, and Sontag moves through a familiar survey of images, taking up one of the major questions of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas: can images of suffering prevent war? Is war photography enough to inspire peace and activism, or does it insulate us from the real suffering of others by turning pain into a spectacle?

One of the things that makes this short survey worthwhile is that it allows Sontag to revisit some of the grand statements she made in her book on photography from the 1970s. Rather than building on her previous claims about the relationship between the ubiquity of the photograph and postmodern malaise, she ends up rejecting many of what used to be her central assumptions:

“As much as they create sympathy, I wrote, photographs shrivel sympathy. Is this true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I’m not so sure now. What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?”  

“But what is really being asked here?  That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an “ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.” 

“The view proposed in On Photography —that our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images—might be called the conservative critique of such images. I call this argument conservative because it is the sense of reality that is eroded.” 

“To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment… it assumes that everyone is a spectator.”

Susan Sontag on Photography

One of the few critical texts that was recommended during my first year of design studies, Susan Sontag's On Photography, features essays that were originally published in The New York Review of Books in the 1970s. Most discussions of technology from the period feel dated and irrelevant, but Sontag follows a critical tradition that blends cultural analysis, history and philosophy in a way that still feels fresh and readable, if not compelling. From the beginning of her first essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” Sontag makes numerous attempts to define the cultural moment of her writing through the growing phenomenon of photography as a practice, on the one hand, and the increasing ubiquity of the photographic image. She sees herself surrounded by “aesthetic consumers” and “image-junkies,” for whom experience itself has become a way of seeing. “Today,” she writes in the essay’s final paragraph, “everything exists to end in a photograph.” Sontag will make a similar kind of statement at the end of her penultimate essay, “Photographic Evangels.” This time, instead of revising the French nineteenth-century poet Mallarmé, she alters a famous statement by the late Victorian critic Walter Pater: “A modernist would have to rewrite Pater’s dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music. Now all art aspires to the condition of photography.”

The essays that make up On Photography are at times polemical and immoderately aphoristic. (The final 25 page section is a collection of quotations featuring the likes of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Lewis Heine, Victor Schlovsky, and Charles Baudelaire.) Definitions for photography abound. Photography appropriates, documents, democratizes, idealizes, distills, amuses, distracts, memorializes, certifies and justifies. As William H. Gass writes in his 1977 review of Sontag’s collection for The New York Review of Books, “No simple summary of the views contained in Susan Sontag's brief but brilliant work on photography is possible, first because there are too many, and second because the book is a thoughtful meditation, not a treatise, and its ideas are grouped more nearly like a gang of keys upon a ring than a run of onions on a sting.” The collection is at times unhelpfully general and scattered, but certain themes do become apparent, if only because of Sontag’s very deliberate attempt to ground her reflections in her present surroundings. What really interests Sontag throughout these six essays is the relationship between photography and reality: the way that photography gives shape to experience and informs our judgements about what counts as “real.”

But this concern for the “real” happens to be one of least interesting things about On Photography. Photography, as an artistic discipline, was at first naively situated within the genre of realism, comprising of what Fox Talbot first described as “natural images,” once believed to provide the viewer with pure access to its subject. Similarly, the great modernist László Moholy-Nagy saw the genius of photography in its ability to render “an objective portrait: the individual to be photographed so that the photographic result shall not be encumbered with subjective intention.” Early defenders of photography as an art form tended champion photography either as an assault on reality or a submission to it. A result of this tension, observes Sontag, is a deep ambivalence towards photography’s means, often manifested in one’s reluctance to use the newest high-powered equipment. But this tension wasn’t really an issue for the new class of photographers that emerged along with cheaper, easier technology.

For Sontag, writing in the 1970s, photography had recently become “a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power” for middle class Americans (8). Finally an affordable past-time, photography became a way of constructing personal and family narratives, documenting notable events (that is, turning situations into events) and doing something with one’s leisure time. For Sontag, the modern photographer cannot be considered without recourse to the figure of the tourist. The camera not only helps to “make real what one is experiencing,” but allows its user to occupy as space outside of what he or she is documenting. “Photographing,” she writes, “is essentially an act of non-intervention.” But it is also “an elegiac art, a twilight art.” To capture a moment in time is to step outside of it: to bear witness to an alternate reality, or, at least, a morbid one.

As a mode of knowing and experiencing the world, photography leaves Sontag feeling jaded and cynical. Although they can help raise our collective consciousness to various injustices throughout the world, photographs are perhaps even more potent in the way that they desensitize us and contribute toward false-consciousness. She writes:

The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. . . . By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is. 

More compelling, and less speculative, is Sontag’s interest in the relationship between photography and art. This relationship hinges on the way that the majority of art is circulated and experienced; that is, through photographs. As Sontag puts it, “photographs have become so much the leading visual experience that we now have works of art which are produced in order to be photographed.” It’s not difficult to see how this thread continues to inform the world of digital aesthetics thirty years later. There was a time when the screen was simply a vehicle for the consumption of images. Now, much of the art that is made for the screen is produced on a screen. Categories like viewers, users and producers seem inadequate for capturing the range of activities enabled by the digital platform.

The controversies of photography’s history are all forms of the debate about its relation to art: “how close it can get while still retaining its claim to unlimited visual acquisition.” For Sontag, the 1970s were a time when the public appetite for photography had less to do with experiencing a neglected art form than with making a break with the abstract art that had become synonymous with modernism. Classical modernist painting, writes Sontag, “presupposes highly developed skills of looking, and a familiarity with other art and with certain notions about the history of art.” Photography, instead, seems to simply make form disappear, delivering its content to viewers without asking much of them. In this way, photography aligns itself with modernism’s populist impulse, its eschewal of high culture and traditionalism. Yet, as Sontag notes, this is precisely the dilemma for modernists: for all their promotion of naive art, they continue to espouse a hidden attachment to their own sophistication.

I wrote an article about my experience at Calgary's short-lived Sled Island music festival for the Spectator Tribune. It features some of my photography. For more photos from the festival, you can head over to CJSR's tumblr page.

Cokemachineglow recently held a "contest" for amateur concert photographers. It was inspired by a series of angry/defensive user comments that responded a CMG writer's rant about how annoying and useless concert photographers are. Though I'm in full agreement with CMG's Clayton Purdom, I couldn't resist submitting one of my own photos. The concert in question was a special occasion. I was four feet away from Stephen Malkmus. How could I not snap a few pictures? And, funny enough, I actually won.

Here are a few more shots from the same show.