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, idealise, 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.