The West, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly

On Susan Sontag, the Wild West, and spring break.

by Luke Zinger

Illustration by Em Bennett

Up until about a month ago, my vision of “the West” was a hazy ideal constructed by half-remembered scenes of galavanting cowboys in network television Westerns, and a hedonistic, rambling set of passages I’d earmarked in my copy of Kerouac’s On the Road. I had dreamlike imaginings of shriveled tumbleweeds crawling down horsetrod desert paths in New Mexico, and giant, thundering tornadoes pummeling wheat fields across Kansas, but no real idea what gave an entire region of the United States the peculiar, enigmatic quality that has come to be so characteristic of the West. 

This spring break, I, along with two of my roommates, set out on a week-long road trip, aiming to take in the particular tenor of the place and capture it in seven days. It was a naïve, thrilling goal, and one that I planned on using a camera to accomplish.

Part of what makes understanding a place—especially one as infamously undefinable as the West—in seven days so ambitious, and so futile, is the natural shortcomings of the human mind to remember everything it sees. So, planning to come back from break knowing the West, I brought with me a digital camera, two disposable cameras with 27 shots each, and my iPhone. The camera’s attention to detail superseded my own, which made it the default auxiliary for allowing me to capture as much experience as I had shots on a roll of film, or as much storage as I had in the cloud. In her book, On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that “photographs, which turn the past into a consumable object, are a short cut” that circumvents the limits of the human memory. Instead of the Winchester rifles of bygone cowboys, I used a camera to shoot the West. Like someone chasing after a running bison for its pelt, I attempted to lasso down dive bar jukeboxes and red, dusty detours so I could show them off to everyone back in New York. “Photographs,” like a now-subdued wild animal, “really are experience captured.”

One of the most widely known and celebrated critics of all time, Susan Sontag’s ideas about photography are some of the most apt and revealing to be written. A collection of six essays about the “meaning and career of photographs,” Sontag’s On Photography (published together in book form in 1977) feels uncannily prophetic about our current moment despite having been written long before consumer digital cameras, cell phones, or the internet. My copy of the book bounced around my roommate's Ford throughout the trip—in my lap as I scribbled annotations in the margins, under the seat after it dropped from my hand as I dozed off, or sitting open on the dash when I put my feet up and gazed out the window. In these essays, Sontag offers insight into the individual’s “compulsion to photograph” that so defines the way we experience reality. Especially when traveling, Sontag writes, we “feel compelled to put the camera between [ourselves] and what [we] encounter. Unsure of other responses, [we] take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on.”

Out in the West, I felt this compulsion frequently. Speeding down the interstate or cruising through farmland on backroads, I was struck, almost constantly, by what I saw. Massive swaths of blue sky crisscrossed by cirrus clouds and commercial airplane chemtrails; wild horses and cattle meandering across the road; giant “JESUS SAVES!” billboards; it was all so unique, so memorable, so worth photographing. I can remember sitting shotgun and scrambling to whip out a camera and capture the moment before it passed us by. And if I happened to be the one driving, or distracted in the backseat and missed the shot, I felt an instant sensation that something had been lost. It was as if by not documenting what I was seeing in a photograph, I was losing the experience of seeing it entirely.

This phenomenon, the equating of experience with photographs of that experience, is a way of living that has been imposed upon us by what Sontag calls the modern “omnipresence of cameras.” Instead of coasting through arid cattle ranches or hallucinatory ghost towns for the pure joy of it, I noticed myself compulsively seeking quintessentially Western scenes to photograph them and provide “indisputable evidence that the trip was made … that fun was had.” Living life in a perpetual state of photo-seeking flattens reality down into two dimensions. Real life is not an angular, carefully demarcated array of flashy scenes. It’s haphazard, temperamental, and composed of millions of minute pieces of sensory information that may at first seem peripheral, but color experience in ways that images cannot. The blister on your toe as you take in a purpling, dusky sky over mountains in West Texas; the dull, dizzying rush of gas station beer that goes straight to your head as you whip around a mechanical bull; the comfortable weight of a best friend’s head resting on your shoulder as you nap in the backseat—this is reality, and so much of it cannot be expressed in photographs. It must be felt firsthand. Photography is not just “a way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.” 

The transposition of memory from what one actually felt to what one remembers photographing is another consequence of our modern, camera-oriented world. Once reality is distilled photographically, what one remembers of an event—a spring break trip, a loved one’s birthday, a wedding, a graduation—becomes not what one actually experienced, but what is contained in the photograph. What I remember of the West now is not so much the exploits themselves, but rather the photographic evidence of those exploits taking place. The Texan cows that sit closest to the front of my memory are not the ones who grunt, swat flies with their tails, and plod blearily around, but ones that exist forever distant, hazy, and flat against a picturesque backdrop of blue sky and green grass. By living behind the viewfinder of a camera, my memories, along with my experiences, have become “atomic, manageable, and opaque.”

In the years following Sontag’s death, the advent and integration of social media into our everyday lives turned the atomizing effect inherent in photography into a tool to be used on the self. Since its early stages, social media has been an interface through which individuals could exhibit photos of themselves, inviting a voyeuristic crowd of hundreds of acquaintances to view and judge those photos, and receive in return the satisfaction that comes from being perceived in a preferential way. Photographic self-portraiture via social media uses the camera’s reductive, simplifying nature and turns it inward to make oneself into an “object that can be symbolically possessed.” We post photographs of ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, for the express purpose of showing ourselves to the world in a way that is comprehensible, interpretable, and classifiable. We reduce our convoluted, ever-mutating selves into a set of ten or so photographs that allows our target audience to see us exactly as, and only as, we would like them to. The imagined extrapolation that we secretly hope others will make when looking at pictures of us on their screen—where is he? What is he looking at? I didn’t know those two were friends! I wonder who’s behind the camera, etc.—is a placating fantasy. People look for ten seconds, lose interest, like the post (maybe), and move on. My seven day road trip becomes one of twelve spring break posts someone scrolls through while waiting in line for the bathroom.

Reality is not an easy thing to live through. It’s muddy, overwhelming, and its unexpected moments of significance are difficult—often impossible—to discern just as they occur. But that fullness is what makes reality a unique experience. It’s what makes life unlike a film, a fictional account, or a carefully curated photograph that asserts the inarguability that its contents are the complete encapsulation of the way things happened. By reflexively thrusting a camera in front of ourselves when life comes at us, we are trying to experience it in a way that feels palatable and easy. We want to have had a gritty, Kerouacian road trip across America, but we want to have done it in the picturesque way—without the aching tailbone, chapped lips, and stomach full of saltines and beef sticks from 7-Eleven. The rhythm of modernity has induced us to fear a way of life that doesn’t instantly compartmentalize every feeling, good or bad, and classify it for later use as social capital to make others amused, admiring, jealous, or impassioned by our experience. Photography simplifies reality just enough so that we can understand it in an instant, but still have the illusion that we lived it to its fullness. By doing this, we’re pulled away from life as it actually is, and we become, as Sontag observes, tourists in our own realities.

Now, about a month after spring break, I still don’t know the West the way that I once hoped I would. I have hundreds of pictures that I took on the trip, and some of them are truly great photos. Those special ones have that perfect air of candidness mixed with intentionality that makes a really spectacular photograph. But, looking at them now in tiny grid form on Instagram, I know that they’re far from what’s real. I wasn’t able to lasso any shreds of reality, and I wasn’t able to tame experience down into something that I could understand absolutely. If nothing else, this spring break has proven to me that photography is fundamentally incapable of crystallizing a person, a time, or an experience entirely. The pulsing tapestry of life continues to defy our modern attempts to duplicate it. No matter how strong our desires for a frictionless, convenient reality may be, existence cannot be fully experienced in any way other than the old-fashioned one. It’s inimitable, irreplaceable, and utterly invaluable. And perhaps that is what makes the great bisons of the West so special, too. That they are forever untamable. Completely free. Completely wild.