On Photography
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First published in 1977, Susan Sontag’s On Photography is a landmark collection of six essays examining how photographs shape our understanding of reality, memory and one another. Beginning with the allegory of Plato’s cave, Sontag explores the camera’s power to turn experience into images, drawing on the work of photographers such as Diane Arbus, Walker Evans and Alfred Stieglitz to question what it means to look, to possess and to record. She considers photography as an instrument of art and documentation, but also as a form of appropriation, a way of collecting the world that can distance us from the very lives it depicts. Her subject is not simply the photograph itself, but the modern appetite for images and the uneasy relationship between seeing and knowing.
Written with the intellectual force and sceptical elegance that distinguish Sontag’s criticism, these essays challenge the assumption that photographs offer transparent windows onto the world. Instead, she asks how images influence taste, shape collective memory and transform suffering into something that can be consumed at a glance. Awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, On Photography became one of the defining works of modern photographic theory, its questions about image-making and visual culture growing ever more pertinent in an age of digital reproduction and incessant photography.
From the book
“Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
On On Photography
“On Photography is to my mind the most original and illuminating study of the subject.”
— Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker