PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE IMAGE-WORLD

Attention to Susan Sontag’s (mis)reading of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity reveals her agenda in On Photography: to depart from ‘the new age of unbelief ’ and return to ‘something like the primitive status of images’ in which an image participates in the reality of the object depicted. For Sontag, photography has reduced the world to its image, yet it is photogra-phy that can get us back to ‘reality’. Sontag’s project is more similar to Feuerbach’s than she allows. Like Feuerbach, Sontag argues that human beings have mistaken the copy for the thing itself and, as a result, have created a false division between the copy and the ‘real, ’ devalued both the copy and the thing itself, and overlooked the profound ways images affect the world. The other world is to be found, as usual, inside this one.1 A well-known proponent of photographic objectivity, the physician and Harvard Medical School professor Oliver Wendell Holmes believed photography was a process of visual representation that separated the form of objects from the physical objects themselves.2 For Holmes, photography was a purely mechanical procedure that copied the world and in which human beings played no role. In ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, Holmes reminds his reader of Democritus of Abdera who believed that ‘all bodies were continually throwing off certain images like themselves’, which strike ‘our bodily organs ’ and give rise to our sensations.3 Epicurus and Lucretius then followed Democritus, writing about forms, or ‘films’, as if they were shed from the surfaces of solids ‘as bark is shed by trees’.4 These films are visible in mirrors, on the surface of a calm body of water, and ‘by the consciousness behind the eye in the ordinary act of vision’, but, Holmes notes, they have no real existence apart from their source, and they ‘perish instantly when it i