Is Photography Dissociative?

John MacDougall, Sanirajaq, September 24, 2005

Susan Sontag, in her great On Photography (1974), writes, “The habit of photographic seeing – of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs – creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.” She goes on to say, 

Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and judge perspective. 

Is this true? For me, it’s the opposite; photography isn’t estrangement; it isn’t dissociative. It’s an act of awareness. And when I’m really rolling, seeing object after object that I want to photograph, it’s an act of heightened awareness. I live for those blissful camera days when I’m so deep into image-hunting I forget myself. When I’m in a perceptual groove like that, photography isn’t dissociative; it’s immersive.

One such day I was in Sanirajaq, on the west coast of Foxe Basin. I got up early and walked the beach. I saw a group of Inuit launching a boat. They pushed it over the snow down to the water and slid it in. An elder, wearing a red toque, climbed in the boat. The others passed him red jerry cans and other supplies. He shoved off and floated out into the blue mirror-like water, thick with drifting ice right to the horizon. The colors were spectacular: blue sky, sculptural white ice, blue water, white boat with two beautiful stripes of aquamarine painted horizontally along the length of its hull, the elder with his brilliant red hat, a red buoy on the bow, also brilliantly red. The Arctic sunlight was ravishing! The scene seized my eyes – so gorgeously natural and painterly, I couldn’t get enough of it. I looked and looked, taking picture after picture. The scene unfolded over thirty minutes or so, I suppose, but I wasn’t aware of time passing or anything else except the remarkable sequence of events taking place in front of me. Maybe that’s what Sontag was getting at when she said photographic seeing is a kind of dissociative seeing. But, for me, a better description is immersion – total immersion.