On Photography

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)