Wall, Tapies, and Goldin: Photography and Painting From the Theoretical Perspective of Susan Sontag The relationship between photography and painting, according to Susan Sontag, is that neither is really "capturing" the world that each attempts to depict. Rather they are capturing or depicting a perspective and the reality remains elusive. They are, in other words, projections of the artist's viewpoint; they are filtered through a particular zeitgeist -- and it is the zeitgeist that needs to be interpreted at root, not the painting or the picture. Painting and photography are merely means of identifying the spirit or ideology of a particular culture in a particular time and place. [footnoteRef:1] This paper will use Sontag's theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between photography and painting by examining three different works: A Sudden Gust of Wind (1993), photographed by Jeff Wall, Composition with Figures (1945), painted by Antoni Tapies, and Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC (1991), photographed by Nan Goldin. [1: Susan Sontag, On Photography (NY: Picador, 1977).]

First, it is essential to understand Sontag's theory. It may be explained thus: While painting and photography are both visual mediums, they reflect in a visual way the world around us. As Shakespeare notes in Hamlet, art acts as a mirror to reality.[footnoteRef:2] However, that artistic expression first goes through the head, eyes, ears, and heart of the artist, which contains its own lens, so to speak. So even in a painting there is a "lens" being used and in a photograph there is a double "lens" being used -- the camera lens and the photographer's "lens" within himself that frames his worldview. Thus, both artists and both mediums are produced through the personal lens or viewpoint of the artist. The effort is, according to Shakespeare, one in which the goal should be to reflect nature -- and on an objective level it might do that to some degree, but that objective interpretation is still subject to the subjective viewpoint of both the artist and the viewer. This is what Sontag focuses on when she asserts that "humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth."[footnoteRef:3] Both painting and photography are "mere images of the truth" -- they are not truth or reality in themselves, or interacting on any pure level with reality; they are just interpretations or reflections -- like the shadows in Plato's cave that the prisoners of the cave take for reality because they are ignorant of the actual reality outside the cave that produces the shadows. Sontag's argument is that while the art may be entertaining, the actual works are not what should be discussed and analyzed but the reality -- the culture, the mindset, the spirit of the times that produced these "shadows." [2: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2, 17-24.] [3: Susan Sontag, On Photography (NY: Picador, 1977), 3.]

Thus, whether it is Wall's Gust of Wind, Tapies' Composition, or Goldin's Misty and Jimmy, the approach should be the same: these are mere shadows passing for reality and there is a higher or separate reality responsible for producing each one. Essentially, that is the relationship, according to Sontag.

Wall's Sudden Gust of Wind, which is a photographic collage, meaning that Wall used separate images, cut them apart and pasted them together to create the sort of effect he was after, may be examined using Sontag's theory and examining the world in which Wall created this collage photograph. First, Wall himself was a painter before he became a photographer and he indicates that both mediums, while unique, are essentially after the same thing, just doing it in their own way: that same thing is reality.[footnoteRef:4] Yet, Sontag would have one remember that the "reality" is not the image itself but the world that allows that image to be produced. A Sudden Gust of Wind is an image that shows various figures reacting to a gust of wind as it scatters one person's papers across a field.[footnoteRef:5] The image is arresting because of its narrative quality: it catches the viewer in medias res -- or "in the middle of the action." The action depicts the lives of ordinary, unsuspecting citizens having their orderly lives (they are walking in a straight, single file line) disturbed by nature -- or reality. The wind blows the papers everywhere, and the flat horizon amplifies the chaos of the wind-blown...

The characters, who are staged with precision for the camera, react as actors would to an event unfolding in front of them: their expressions and gestures convey surprise, shock, fear, helplessness. As Baudrillard would observe, the image is showing "a radically non-objective world" in the sense that it is both a manufactured image produced using the collage method and it is also representing the personal or subjective experiences of the characters in the frame.[footnoteRef:6] In other words, Wall photographs and edits an image in order to convey a personal feeling to the viewer -- there is nothing documentary about the photograph. It is indicative of, as Sontag's theory would show, a culture that feels the need to remind itself of its fragility, its being on the verge of catastrophe as it mechanically goes along without giving thought at all to what might happen when reality restores itself. Interestingly, Wall's photograph depicts the essence of Sontag's main thesis when she writes that "the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images."[footnoteRef:7] Sontag argues that this grandiosity is a false sense of security -- for it is not reality that is being contained in the head but rather shadows, images -- falsehoods. This same idea is conveyed in Wall's photograph as reality (the gust of wind) comes along and blows the "ideas" out of order and out of the passion of the individual in the frame -- what one thought one had is now gone; the collection of papers (like Sontag's catalogue of images that one collects) were not reality: reality is what blew them away. [4: David Shapiro, "Jeff Wall." MuseoMagazine. Web. 26 Nov 2015.] [5: Jeff Wall, "Study for 'A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)," Tate. Web. 26 Nov 2015.] [6: Jean Baudrillard, "Photography, or the Writing of Light," The European Graduate School. Web. 28 Oct 2015.] [7: Susan Sontag, On Photography (NY: Picador, 1977), 3.]
Sontag continues, stating that "to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed."[footnoteRef:8] In this sense, Wall is taking what is not his -- a scene choreographed in reality -- and sealing it up in a box (the frame), isolating it from its context (the fact that Wall the photographer hired actors to perform a scene because he wanted to capture an idea on film). Outside of this context, the photograph adopts a new meaning with its own narrative -- and like a book it can be collected and stored on a bookshelf, or hung on a wall. A Wall on a wall -- the surrealism of the expression indicates the point that Sontag is making: the image itself is not reality and the narrative it conveys has more to do with the artist's outlook as situated within his culture than it does with the actual reality that was photographed on that day when Wall took the picture. Sontag's theory is that art, any kind of art, "means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power."[footnoteRef:9] Thus, the relationship between photography and painting, therefore, could be said to be a relationship of power. Which one is more powerful? Both are equally capable of giving a feeling of power, as can be seen in Tapies' Composition -- and especially as in the Digital Age, the ability to mass produce images, even reproductions of paintings, makes both mediums virtually equal in what Walter Benjamin calls "presence in time and space": no longer is viewing them a matter of being where they are at a given moment.[footnoteRef:10] The Internet makes all things readily available -- one merely has to type in Wall's Gust of Wind or Tapies' Composition -- and up it comes. Art is immediate. It is stored in the cloud. But as Sontag insists, it is not reality. What, then, is? And what can art say of it? [8: Susan Sontag, On Photography (NY: Picador, 1977), 4.] [9: Susan Sontag, On Photography (NY: Picador, 1977), 4.] [10: Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Marxists.org. Web. 26 Nov 2015.]

Tapies' Composition depicts an androgynous figure in the center of the canvas, hedged in on either side by anonymous twins. Above the nameless central figure is a symbolic but abstract figure (a bird, a dove, a small person?). Conventional religious allegory would suggest that it is a bird, a symbol of the Holy Ghost, whose spiritual purity radiates from it in…