On Photography

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed,” Susan Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography, a groundbreaking collection which has gone on to influence generations of theorists, critics, and readers everywhere. Published in 1977, Sontag’s seminal work, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, remains uncannily prescient and profoundly incisive to this day. With her searching eye and refusal to buckle to received wisdom, Sontag presents a rousing critique of the functions of imagery—to seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to persuade, to deceive—across six formidable essays. The result is a complex portrait of the contradictory ways we use imagery to manufacture reality and authority, conveyed by her singular depth of analysis, that will endure for decades to come. Paperback, 224 pages.