Susan Sontag ’ s Melancholy Object in the Wake of ( Post- ) Postmodernism
al intelligence , claiming that photography influences our look on , and interaction with , real life events . Thus , it comes as no surprise that multiple scholars also mention “ Detachment ” as the core of Sontag ’ s moralist problem with photography . As photographs are detached moments of a greater narrative that we , as viewers , do not know , we can interpret or dismiss a photographed situation , as we like ( Sontag 292-93 ).
One of the essays of On Photography describes photos as “ Melancholy Objects .” Sontag describes the melancholic feeling a photo can evoke when the viewer becomes aware of the distance ( a form of detachment ) they feel towards it . This can come from a distance in time , space , politics , or culture , either with what is depicted or from the materiality of the photo ( Dewdney ). Sontag originates this distance as a concept from the surrealist tradition . For Sontag , surrealism is less a picturing of a dreamlike image and more a picturing of what the surrealists viewed as uncanny lifestyles . The exotic , the sexually liberated or “ obscene ,” the poor and the royalty : they are all against the then-ruling , modernist bourgeois lifestyle . What makes something look surreal to us is something we do not experience in our everyday life ( Sontag 41-45 ). Sontag notes : “ What is surreal is the distance imposed and bridged , by the photograph : the social distance , and the distance in time . Seen from middle-class perspective of photography : celebrities are as intriguing as pariahs ” ( 45 ). This is why , for example , even contemporary wildlife or nature pictures from magazines like Lonely Planet or National Geographic can make us feel melancholic . They show remote areas in which the cultural and political lifestyle of urbanized places is non-present . They are , de facto , distanced from us , not in time , but in space and lifestyle .
Another surrealist aspect that Sontag mentions is the “ collage making of history ” that photographs enable us to do . When
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