I found this book utterly maddening. I'm giving it four stars not for the content itself, but for the quality of thinking I did while reading. I'm rather surprised not to have found any comments in other reviews regarding Sontag's horrific tactlessness in her discussions of "freaks" (in the context of Diane Arbus' work). Less shocking but also disappointing: her wholesale dismissal of the Surrealists, or as she calls them two or three times, the Surrealist "militants", which they decidedly were

This is a classic book of essays about how photography reveals so much about society, politics, history, and our attitudes towards preserving the image and the potential "truth" inherent in a photograph. I don't read much nonfiction, and this was originally for a class, but there isn't a single person I wouldn't recommend this to.

In Plato’s Cave - 5/5America, Seen ThroughPhotographs, Darkly - 4/5Melancholy Objects - 5/5The Heroism of Vision - 4/5Photographic Evangels - 5/5The Image-World - 5/5The above six essays simply make up of the most highly regarded and thoroughly interesting books of its kind. I'm a big fan of Roland Barthes's 'Camera Lucida' (although about photography it's more a personal book dealing with the loss of his mother) and this was equally as good if not better.Sontag raises important and exciting que...

This is the worst book I've read about photography. It isn't even about photography, it is about Susan Sontag consistently misunderstanding photographs. It isn't intellectual, either. It is her emotional responses to the shallowest possible reading of photographs. The defining moment is in the appendix of quotations, the only good part of the book. The first quote is from the notebooks of William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the earliest photographers. He wrote, "Make picture of kaleidoscope." This

This was terribly interesting, but I think you needed to know a little more than Sontag explained to understand where she is coming from in all this. The important thing to remember is that Plato wanted to banish the artists and he wanted to do this for a very good reason. To Plato the world we live in isn’t really the real world – the real world is a world we cannot have access to, the real world is where things never die, things remain the same and don’t change. Change and death, to Plato, are...

I was fond of photography (no disappearance on that side!) It was the first book dealing with photography, which is not technical, that I read. I remember something profound complex, which helped me better penetrate this image's world even if the subject was not treated only under its artistic side. Good memories.

Q: Why is this book called "On Photography"? Given that not one word of this book says sustains a single positive sentiment about cameras and their usage, why wouldn't it be called "Against Photography," or maybe "Photography is the Downfall of Human Kind."This is not at all the book I thought it was. Given its most quoted statement, "To collect photographs is to collect the world," I expected a somewhat romantic vision of the photographic craft. Little did I know that Sontag credits photography...

Written in cool and caustic prose, On Photography consists of seven meditations on the medium's ethics, social uses, and history. Sontag drops epigram after epigram, aphorism after aphorism, in these contentious essays, as she speeds through considering the subjects of photography's most famous practitioners, be it the rural towns of Roy Stryker or the "freaks" of Diane Arbus. Despite the essays' fast pace, the work as a whole lacks anything approaching a coherent direction or central thesis. It...

The camera as a phallus. What an idea! Outrageous, scandalous, sexy and with a great degree of truth. We're all image junkies, living in an age where we try to mark our development through a series of photographs that we hope will speak for us, instead of us. Sontag writes that to photograph is to appropriate the photographed. And it's not just objects that are photographed, we photograph poverty, misery, pain, death - so we appropriate emotions too- to what purpose? To use the photograph as a s...

I've never read anything by Susan Sontag, but encountered mentions of her book On Photography numerous times in various contexts. It's hailed as "one of the most highly regarded books of its kind". I like taking photographs myself, and thought I would find it interesting.Those seeking a well-constructed history of photography, its development and an introduction to various schools and movements of photography - as I did - are likely to be disappointed. On Photography has no central thesis, and i...

It’s like there are questions and shadows in the periphery of my vision, and Susan Sontag puts both hands on my shoulders and turns me to face them head on.

Step one: buy this book. Step two: find a writing utensil Step three: go on the subway/metro/pvta and go!you will want to underline just about every sentence because it is life changing. You will want to hug your camera and then throw it into a fire. You will never approach the world the same again. Get ready. Just do it. And then go read Regarding the Pain of Others, because it will be like playing Candyland.

I approached On Photography expecting a sense of warmth and intellect that Maria Popova paints Susan Sontag with. One essay in, I was slightly disappointed to feel no warmth. So, I read an interview of hers where the interviewer says the "yes and no" attitude is typical of her writing, something that I had experienced as well. She responds by saying that it is not yes and no, rather this but also that. She argues in defence of the premise of seriousness, an idea both close to my heart and valuab...

Susan Sontag starts her book on photography with a reference to Plato's cave, a dark prison only a few escape. This is not accidental. It defines and presages the thinking that underlies the whole book. By placing a reference to Plato at the very beginning Sontag is telling us: 'I subscribe to the fundamental Platonic principles: the real world vs. the world of imitations. Forms vs. art. Reality vs. the cave.' Or something like that. So what does this entail for her analysis of photography?Sonta...

To think this was published in 1973 - when photographs were just mementos and souvenirs. What have they become now, in the age of the selfie? Sontag, Barthes, Benjamin, etc - many people have written about the semiotics and significance of photography as an "art." Photography has been held up as a record of things "as they were" - "photographs become exhibits in the trial that is history." says Walter Benjamin, comparing the subjects of photographs to crime scenes. But are photos still treated a...

4.5*Excellent book, even though its more than 4 decades old.

Just over 3 years ago (I am writing this at the end of 2020), I calculated that my pension fund was large enough to allow me to retire from professional work in the HR Department of a large IT company and, instead, declare myself a self-employed nature/wildlife photographer. In doing this, I turned a 30 year hobby into a sort of job. I completely understand what a privileged position I am in: doing what I have always dreamed of doing but with no pressure to make a living from it.This book has be...

Like many people before me, I felt a certain dread the next time I tried to pick up my camera after reading this book. Susan Sontag's incredible, penetrating critique of photography doesn't just cast into doubt the value of the activity of taking a photograph, but it posits some of the irrevocable changes that the advent of this technology has had on our world and how we experience it. Anyone who reads this having previously nurtured an interest in photography at any level should experience a de...

On Photography, Susan SontagFirst 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 photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means.This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Pl...

On hold. While fascinating, 'every sentence contains a thought' is not as fun as it sounds.