Photography is also different from realistic painting. (The role transpositions in cinema and video are very different again from both painting and photograph, because they capture movement in time, albeit still from the eye of the camera and on principles of linear perspective.)

“Painting,” says Susan Sontag, “was handicapped from the start by being a fine art, with each object a unique, handmade original. A further liability was … the exceptional technical virtuosity” required then, no longer required with photography.¹⁶³ Photography mechanizes realistic imaging, so making it accessible to the masses. There is no need to use grids to calculate relative size and position because the lens calculates relative size in an image to render the effect of depth.

The non-technical multitude have just a few things to learn: focus, aperture, shutter speed, and framing. Or even less in mass market cameras from the Box Brownie of 1900 to the Instamatic of 1963 that offered fixed focus, just one shutter speed, and few if any aperture options. “You press the button, we do the rest,” promised the Eastman Kodak company in its advertisements for the Box Brownie. “Just point and shoot,” they said of the Instamatic. With digital cameras, all you have to do now is frame.

Realistic painting by comparison requires premeditation and methodical attention to the effects of perspective and detail. Details add realism – the bowl and the books casually leaning at an angle on the shelf in Botticelli’s Madonna of the Book.^§MS2.2a Every such gratuitous detail the painter must have meant to be there because he put it there. Realism is a conscious device. But in the case of details in a photograph, we don’t know whether they are there accidentally, having been un-noticed by the photographer, or noticed to be there and included in the frame by design.

Also, although time is sliced into frozen moments both by painting and photography, the photographic moment passes in the instant that is imaged; the painter’s image is slow to compose. A photograph is made in the instant that it freezes. Its start is its end. Painting happens in a longer timeframe, and the disjunction between the start and the end if its making affords space for premeditation and imagination.

Photography slices time and vision less methodically, in the impulsive moment of a shutter release. This is a different kind of agency on the part of the I-eye. It is an “art of chance.”¹⁶⁴ It is more open to accident, with a greater unnoticed surplus, and so more open to re-interpretation both by image maker and viewer, recovering things that were in the first instance unnoticed.

Sontag: “Unlike the fine-art objects of pre-democratic eras, photographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist. Rather, they owe their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject – mediated by an ever-simpler and more automated machine, which is tireless, and which even when capricious can produce a result that is interesting and never entirely wrong.”¹⁶⁵

Sontag again: “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can create.” For these reasons, “a photograph … seems to have more innocent, and therefore more accurate relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects … To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge.”

This process of transposition (to insert our term) is far from innocent. The printed word, by comparison, “seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have of the look of the past and the reach of the present.”¹⁶⁶

Photography becomes a pervasive part of a disingenuous dialectic of objectivism and subjectivism that is new to modernity itself, transposing self, other, and object – the eye of the photographer with the eye of the viewer, the object or other with its representation fixed in time and two-dimensional image plane.

These practices of sense-making now pervade a whole series of genres and transformative social practices of memorializing.

Family photographs: “Photography becomes a rite of family life just when, in the industrializing countries of Europe and America, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery. As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of dispersed relatives.”¹⁶⁷

Tourism: “Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that the fun was had. Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends, neighbors.”¹⁶⁸

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¹⁶³ Susan Sontag, 1977, On Photography, New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, p. 47.

¹⁶⁴ Robin Kelsey, 2015, Photography and the Art of Chance, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

¹⁶⁵ Susan Sontag, 1977, On Photography, New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, pp. 48–49.

¹⁶⁶ Ibid., pp. 3, 5, 3.

¹⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 8.

¹⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 8.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 230–232. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Susan Sontag’s "On Photography" §MS2.2.2b