Library

The book that made Susan Sontag famous. A collection of essays on what photography is, its meaning and development.

Susan Sontag's collection of essays, On Photography, first appeared as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book that made her famous, Sontag concludes that the widespread use of photography leads to the establishment of a relationship of "chronic voyeurism" between man and the world, as a result of which everything that happens begins to be located on the same level and acquires the same meaning. The main paradox of photography, according to Sontag, is that the person who takes the picture cannot intervene in what is happening, and vice versa - if he participates in the event, he is no longer able to capture it in the form of a photographic image.

“It all started with one essay – about some aesthetic and moral problems raised by the ubiquity of photographic images; but the more I thought about what photography is, the more complex and fascinating these problems seemed. So one essay led to another, and then (to my surprise) another. It became a chain of articles on the meaning and development of photography that took me so far that the ideas outlined in the first, continued and documented in the following ones, could be summarized and expanded in a more theoretical way – and left at that." - Susan Sontag