Key themes
- Photography as a way of appropriating the world — and what this costs
- The photograph and the real — how images change our relationship to experience
- Photography as a democratic art with authoritarian tendencies
About this book
What taking and viewing photographs does to us; a brilliant, much-quoted set of essays.
Published in 1977, On Photography collects essays Sontag published in the New York Review of Books. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is widely considered one of the most important critical works on photography and visual culture.
Discussion questions
- Sontag argues that photography creates a 'chronic voyeuristic relation' to the world — that taking photographs substitutes for experience rather than deepening it. How does she develop this — and does it still hold?
- The photograph is both more and less real than what it depicts: it captures a moment perfectly but is always a fragment. How does Sontag develop the paradoxes of photographic truth — and how does this relate to documentary and news photography?
- Sontag argues that photographs create their own criteria for what is real and beautiful — that they educate our eye and then we see the world through what photographs have taught us to look for. What are the implications of this?
- The essay deals with photography as it existed in 1977 — before digital manipulation became normal and before everyone had a camera in their pocket. How would Sontag's arguments apply to the current era of smartphones and social media?
- On Photography is written in a distinctly difficult, aphoristic style. How does the form serve the content — and what does it demand of the reader?
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