On Photography [Paperback]

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

A new edition of Susan Sontags groundbreaking critique of photographyits problems, politics, and possibilities.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed, Sontag writes in the opening pages ofOn 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 imageryto seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to conspire, to concealacross 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.

Susan Sontagwas the author of four novels, includingThe Benefactor,Death Kit,The Volcano Lover, andIn America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories,I, etcetera; several plays, includingAlice in Bed; and nine works of essays, among themOn 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.

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 ofOn Photographyraises 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. Jol“£