Susan Sontag's "In Plato's Cave" and Yves Klein's Leap into the void

¶ … Sontag photograph in Plato's cave with Yves Klein leap into the void.

Susan Sontag's "In Plato Cave" as applied to Yves Klein's photograph, "Leap into the void"

According to Susan Sontag, photographs possess tremendous power. "Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe" (Sontag 3). To be a photographer is to be in a position of power over one's subject: the creation of a still life appropriates the object being photographed and turns it into something else. A good example of this might be an indigenous person photographed by a tourist. By him or herself, the indigenous person is simply 'real life' and equally human to someone in the developed world. By taking a photograph of the individual, however, the photographer renders the indigenous person into an object that is representative of local culture.

This is very dangerous because even though photographs are created by the vision and the perspective of the taker, they appear to be unfiltered depictions of 'real life.' There is a surface texture of reality and photographs, unlike works like art, seem like little pieces of reality, even though they are just as subjective as a painting. "In deciding how a picture should look, preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects" (Sontag 6). Sontag uses the example of the photos of displaced farmers during the 1930s as an example: although these pictures appeared to be quite naturalistic, they were, in fact, highly crafted and staged to say what the photographers wanted them to say. Photographs can also be distorted and tampered with so that what appears to be taken from life is a mirage, even though the photographic medium seems more truthful than art, drawing, or other forms of seemingly more subjective representation.

Sontag sees all photographs as potentially exploitative, regardless of whether they idealize the subject and show a positive representation or whether they are mundane photographs of everyday events. All photographs conceal an agenda. Sontag seems to suggest as if it is impossible to read a photograph in a critical manner because of the inherent nature of the medium. As ubiquitous as the hobby has become and as integral as it is in terms of creating artifacts pertaining to human life, the uncritical and instinctive acceptance of the 'reality' of photographs is difficult to overcome.

Yves Klein's photograph, "Leap into the void" seems to support many of Sontag's assertions in the sense that it is a very obviously created photograph, depicting the photographer throwing himself off of a wall in a series of stages. When the photograph was taken, Klein jumped into a net held below but that part of the photograph was deliberately airbrushed out. The photo was designed to show human folly in regards to the space program. Klein's agenda may not be immediately obvious but the photograph does create an impression in the eyes of the viewer of a foolishly daring leap, suggesting that humans have an inherent drive towards self-destruction and it was very self-consciously created to communicate this meaning.