On Photography

Susan Sontag was one of the most dazzling and influential commentators on the art and culture of her time. Published in 1977 and still astonishingly prescient, her groundbreaking study, On Photography, was one of the first books to ask forceful questions about this modern art form: its power to shock, idealize, act as a memorial, as propaganda, to be used as evidence, and to misrepresent – Sontag was amongst the earliest to write about the photograph’s ability to deceive. Sontag explores these moral and aesthetic issues with reference to the work of the great photographers – Steichen, Atget, Lange, Brassai, Arbus and many others – and outlines a thought-provoking history of the medium. This first-ever illustrated edition includes key photographs from prestigious photographic archives, all beautifully reproduced, selected with Mia Fineman, curator of photography at the Met.

THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED EDITION
Sontag illuminates her text with references to many photographers pivotal in the history of photography, as well as some of the most memorable and iconic images of the 20th century. Working closely with Mia Fineman, we have collated 21 of these images, primarily from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, two of the most prestigious photographic archives in the world. All beautifully reproduced, the photographs have been positioned throughout the text. As Fineman writes in her newly commissioned introduction to the edition, these images: "are intended to enhance and amplify Sontag’s text, to provide a visual anchor for the mind’s eye, and hopefully, to summon a bit of the medium’s magic."

A CONTROVERSIAL AND VISIONARY STUDY
Sontag loved photography, but she thought it encompassed "everything that’s brilliant and ingenious and poetic and pleasureful … and also everything that is destructive and polluting and manipulative in society." She took this one aspect of everyday culture and instead of letting it pass unnoticed, she asked new and powerful questions about it: she was one of the first to highlight photography's power to manipulate and deceive, for example. Many of her concerns are even more relevant today: our addiction to the image, the taking of a photo as a substitute for experience, the distortion of reality, voyeurism and the ethics of reportage. Original and thought-provoking, packed with brilliance and insight, On Photography is as exciting and pertinent a read as it was 40 years ago.