On Photography - by Susan Sontag (Paperback)

About the Book

"Originally published in 1977 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

A new edition of Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography--its problems, politics, and possibilities.

"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed," Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography, which went on to influence generations of theorists, film critics, and readers everywhere. Originally published in the 1970s, her groundbreaking collection remains uncannily prescient and profoundly precise.

With her singular searching eye, and her refusal to buckle under received wisdom, she presents a rousing critique of the functions of imagery--to seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to conspire, to conceal--across six essays. The result is a damning portrait of the ways we use imagery to manufacture reality and authority that feels as if it were written today.

Review Quotes

"A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world and at ourselves over the last 140 years." --Washington Post Book World

"Every page of On Photography raises important and exciting questions about its subject and raises them in the best way." --The New York Times Book Review

"A book of great importance and originality . . . All future discussion or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies are now bound to begin with her book." --John Berger

"Not many photographs are worth a thousand of [Susan Sontag's] words." --Robert Hughes, Time

"After Sontag, photography must be written about not only as a force in the arts, but as one that is increasingly powerful in the nature and destiny of our global society." --Newsweek

"On Photography is to my mind the most original and illuminating study of the subject." --Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker

About the Author

Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, including The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and nine works of essays, among them On Photography, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. In 2001, Sontag was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. She died in New York City in 2004.