By: MG
Photography is all about perspective, just like philosophy. The interpretation of a subject, whether visual or philosophical, depends on the viewer. For example, a photo of the sea can be interpreted as a metaphor for freedom or as a metaphor for ominous despair.
The only difference is who is interpreting the image. With philosophy, thought experiments teach us to examine our perspectives and cross them with other possibilities to grow our mindsets and expand our perspectives. However, most famous thought experiments lack a certain modern consideration for just how manipulated by and through the use of technology we have become. For example, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, written in around 375 B.C.E., is a widely known thought experiment that has been adapted to apply to modern forms of shadows such as media and news. (Above Photo taken by Margaret Gleed)
Susan Sontag refers to Plato’s allegory in her essay “In Plato’s Cave” from On Photography. She discusses how education through photographs gives us the idea that we know more than we do. While we may not have taken the photo ourselves, that view exists somewhere and looked exactly like the image at one time.
(Image Link) Plato’s allegory comes from his book “The Republic.” It outlines Plato’s theory of the world of ideas and the process of philosophizing. It begins with men sitting chained in front of a cave wall with their backs to the opening, unable to move. On the wall in front of them, shadows dance, telling stories and reflecting events happening behind them. However, because these reflections are all the men know, they believe them to be accurate tellings. The men do not understand that these images are false and are manipulated by others in the cave. Somehow, one of the men is released and travels out of the cave to discover that the shadows on the wall are false stories. He then re-enters the cave, but the men still chained cannot understand what the free man tells them since he has now become a shadow on the wall, which they cannot clearly understand. For Plato, the cave represents the imaginary world, filled with representations of ideas but not the true objects. When the man escapes, he begins the journey of philosophizing and realizing that his old world is false. When he emerges out of the cave, the outside worlds represent the world of ideas, which, according to Plato, holds the true essence of all objects and people.
Now, Plato’s theory of ideas is mostly forgotten when discussing his allegory. However, the concept of living in a false world until you forcefully discover reality holds fast. Especially today, we are surrounded by photographs and video clips of places we will never visit ourselves but can still act as though we have firsthand knowledge of the environment. We live in our own version of Plato’s cave, except our cave in a hand-held smartphone with access to the internet.
I never really thought about the danger of mass photo sharing aside from possible physical risks. I never fully realized that it forces most of us into a sense of false knowledge. There is a quote from Sontag’s essay that specifically caught my attention.
“Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.”
Photographs are like Plato’s shadows. They are manipulated to present us images that we observe as truth unless there is egregious editing or photoshop error. With the evolution of technology, photographs have become how we express our emotions and capture our experiences. This scrapbooking mentality spurs statements like “if there’s no photo, it didn’t happen.” The entire world has turned into our cave, and there is no possible way for us to determine the truth behind every image we see. How, then, can we break away from the facilities of photos and manipulation when we are the creators and perpetrators of misinformation? Will there ever be a time where we see an image divested of forced perspective?
Watch List:
Video On Plato's Allegory of the Cave