Geoffrey Ansel Agrons
Free Swim II
2011
Archival pigment print
Paper size: 11" x 17"
About Geoffrey Ansel Agrons
"In her polemic "On Photography", Susan Sontag argued that the proliferation of images in the modern era fostered a passive "chronic voyeuristic relation" to the world around us. As a diagnostic radiologist, I spent my workdays interpreting "photographs" of the human interior. Each study was approached as a puzzle with a potential solution, and each analysis was a quest for certainty. Through concise language in a written report, I sought to minimize ambiguity. The images were presumed to hold meaning for the patient and their physician, and often that meaning resulted in intervention on the patient's behalf. In this narrow sense, at least, Sontag was wrong.
In time I came to recognize that an unspoken aesthetic appreciation of diagnostic images was deeply entwined with the rigor of anatomic analysis, logic, and problem solving. But I grew interested in a different relationship with photography, one that separated an immediate emotional response from vigilant interpretation. I acquired a camera and began to explore the world beyond the darkened radiology reading room. The still camera became my modality of choice for affective diagnostic imaging. In the process, I found respite in feeling rather than thinking."