Susan Sontag

First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Sontag develops further the concept of transparency. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photography freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid essays, the most famous being Plato's Cave make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

On Photography

Susan Sontag's On Photography is a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject.Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites'The Times'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves'Washington Post'The most original and illuminating study of the subject'New YorkerOne of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images."

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Mia Caven

Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism. One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag's On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as "a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." It begins with the famous "In Plato's Cave"essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching "Brief Anthology of Quotations."

Hannah Yang

unbelievably delighted to be able to say that i have finally read the entirety of on photography! every book a person reads influences who they are, but so few have as immediate and direct impact on how you 'see' (literally!) the world as this charismatically-written collection of essays and quotations. this is simply the most transformative required reading i have ever had and i will adore sontag (and ulit) forever.

Dave | Storyphoria

For something that is always listed and talked about as THE book about photography that every photographer needs to read, Sontag seems to be dripping in disdain for photography. She comes off as very pretentious, very hateful of photography as an art or otherwise, and ultimately as the book goes one she seems to spend more time talking in circles than anything else. 

The one positive thing this book gave me was the ability to think about my own photography, what it means to me and how photography impacts me... what it's real value is, and better understand just why I love it so much. Even if it was only revealed due to how much she seems to think otherwise.

Audrey Kalman

my Maekan review: https://maekan.com/readworthy-on-phot...

Christopher McCaffery

Some interesting insights and proactive passages interspersed among endless meandering discussions of random photographers.

Susan Sontag's On Photography is a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject. Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives. 'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites'The Times 'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves'Washington Post 'The most original and illuminating study of the subject'New Yorker One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

On Photography

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