Hypocritical Susan Sontag...is positively pedantic and pretentious

Reading Susan Sontag's On Photography and second essay, America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly, is just infuriating! Arbus' work is so original? No it was not. And it was Weegee's disaster series that inspired her work? No it wasn't. It was Weegee's photography on the absurd, the grotesque, the odd that inspired her work. 

And you're going to tell me that Warhol's work was narcissistic!? His work is a direct reflection of society, in particular the disgusting obsession with celebritism (the obsession with fame, hence his 15 minutes of fame quote) which has just gotten worse. That's not narcissistic; his work acts as a mirror. Arbus' work on the other hand is absolutely narcissistic! 

Arbus has chosen this subject matter because she sees her 'safe' childhood as a form of adversity, as a flaw. Ergo, her work is narcissistic because she experimented with photographing the strange, the odd, the taboo for her own personal experience and personal gain (and personal satisfaction) to make up for the lack of the absurd, the grotesque in her youth. 

It's interesting that Sontag admires her work so greatly - she says it's a fuck you to popular culture, it's an active statement against the conventional, the popular, which is fascinating because Sontag considers the act of photography as passivity ( read previous essay). Sontag is arrogant, pedantic and pretentious, and her work is arrogant, pedantic and pretentious. Her argument is flawed - its structure is so holey it metaphorically resembles that of swiss cheese.

The obsession with uniqueness is so....completely banal and prosaic. Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest are boring and repetitive and the impulsivity fostered by 'social media' leads to a narcissistic society mental model which happens to become quite monotonous. It's narcissistic of Sontag to give a completely one-sided argument, but that is/was her personality; always going against the current. It gets boring to be so rebellious, and to maintain the same facade for so long, is well, rather inhibitory.