On Photography

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.

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 04/15/2025
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.30w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9781250374745
ISBN10: 125037474X
BISAC Categories:
- Photography | Criticism
- Art | Criticism & Theory

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.