Light and shadow

"HUMANKIND lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave," Susan Sontag's book On Photography begins, "still revelling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth." But reading on through "In Plato's Cave", which is the first of the six essays that make up the book, we see that photographs have replaced what Plato would have called mere appearances. How photography reflects ethical and political self-understanding - however compromised - seems to be the theme of "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly," the second essay in Sontag's book. Just before telling us how photographs define reality, Sontag had remarked that "the only question is whether the function of the image world created by cameras could be other than what it is". And should it not sting, anymore, to be told that the 'humanity' disclosed by the photograph is merely "a quality things have in common when viewed as photographs", coming to see how that stung once may give us some sense, however fleeting, of the ethical and political understanding photography might in fact have compromised.