On Photography

In her great classic work ON PHOTOGRAPHY (1977), without including a single photograph, Susan Sontag looks at the impact of photography on real life in the 20th century. Her thesis is that the universal presence of the photographic image in our lives as something we take for granted has made the photograph more real than what it represents, and has changed irrevocably our notion of reality. Sontag explores different ways of seeing as she comments on the work of innovative photographers and filmmakers, and shows how, over the years, photography has transformed society in ways that we might not expect. ON PHOTOGRAPHY was a bestseller when it was published, and won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism in 1977. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.