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BOOK 114: ON PHOTOGRAPHY: SUSAN SONTAG

On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977.

On Photography won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1977 and was selected among the top 20 books of 1977 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.

In 1977, William H. Gass, writing in the New York Times, said the book "shall surely stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon the subject" of photography.

In a 1998 appraisal of the work, Michael Starenko, wrote in Afterimage magazine that "On Photography has become so deeply absorbed into this discourse that Sontag's claims about photography, as well as her mode of argument, have become part of the rhetorical 'tool kit' that photography theorists and critics carry around in their heads."

Sontag's work is literary and polemical rather than academic. It includes no bibliography, and few notes. There is little sustained analysis of the work of any particular photographer and is not in any sense a research project as often written by Ph.D students. Many of the lesser reviews from the world of art photography that followed On Photography at the time of its publication were skeptical and often hostile, such as those of Colin L. Westerbeck and Michael Lesy.

In 2004, Sontag published a partial refutation of the opinions she espoused in On Photography in her collection of essays Regarding the Pain of Others. This book may be deemed as a postscript or addition to On Photography. Sontag's publishing history includes a similar sequence with regard to her work Illness as Metaphor from the 1970s and AIDS and Its Metaphors a decade later, which included a revision of many ideas contained in the earlier work.

MY VERDICT: I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  I was annoyed that I’d owned it for so long without reading it.  I loved that it wasn’t academically written and talked directly to you, expressing ideas and putting forwards opinions, I loved that it wasn’t highfalutin the way that a lot of essays on art or photography can be.  Some of the ideas were expressed in a way that was so simple you felt idiotic for not thinking of them yourself.