On Photography

Add to My Reading List

Susan Sontag

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1977, English

Nonfiction, Photography

ISBN: 9780374226268

From the Publisher (Penguin reprint, 2008). Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.

On 3 book lists

Expand all text

Jennifer Morla

On Jennifer Morla’s Book List

Ian Ritchie

On Ian Ritchie’s Book List

As with Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, this book appealed because I thought that it would offer insights into our society and the emergence of a “thin” world where image (not content, argument, or even words) was becoming the dominant cultural expression. It did not disappoint.

Véronique Vienne

On Véronique Vienne’s Book List

. . . Published in 1977 as a collection of essays reprinted (in a slightly different form) from The New York Review of Books, On Photography is a prophetic book whose chilling analysis describes the way photography, more than ever, mediates our experience of reality but also controls it. Webcams, iPhones, video-conferencing, Skype conversations, surveillance cameras, intimate pictures showing up on Facebook (just to name some of the phenomena that define our time), are evidence that “through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers.” . . . View the complete text

In the summer of 2005, while crossing Montparnasse Cemetery, I came across what looked like a small overgrown herb garden at the end of a tree-lined alley. Tucked between the plants, I found a discreet sign identifying the wild patch of greenery as Susan Sontag’s grave. I was stunned—unexpectedly confronted with the ghost of someone I had idolized and whose recent passing I was still mourning. What was she doing here in Paris—the place of her resting barely identified by a marker? Unable to believe my own eyes, I did what most tourists do when they encounter something they do not comprehend: I took out my digital camera and shot a picture of the makeshift gravesite.

“All photographs are memento mori,” Sontag wrote in the first chapter of On Photography. “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

Only after the fact did I realize that my behavior upon discovering Sontag’s gravesite had been a textbook demonstration of what she had observed as a literary theorist and art critic: taking photographs is a way to certify an experience but also to refuse it, by converting the moment into an image, a souvenir, a thing of beauty.

Published in 1977, as a collection of essays reprinted (in a slightly different form) from The New York Review of Books, On Photography is a prophetic book whose chilling analysis describes the way photography, more than ever, mediates our experience of reality but also controls it. Webcams, iPhones, video-conferencing, Skype conversations, surveillance cameras, intimate pictures showing up on Facebook (just to name some of the phenomena that define our time), are evidence that “through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers.”

Within months of my first visit to Sontag’s grave, the herb garden was replaced by a black marble slab with a severe black marble gravestone on top of it. The highly polished surface of the monument is as shiny as the coating of a piece of negative film. I fancy that this memorial acts as a huge photographic plate recording the ever-changing Parisian sky, not as a still picture but as the fluid expression of a fugitive reality.

Shorten the text

comments powered by Disqus

Announcements

Designers & Books Tours

Designers & Books Tours:

Customized tours providing the opportunity to explore the places, meet the people, and see the books of the design book world in New York City.

For information:
PH: 212-777-9080
or
info@designersandbooks.com

Understanding Understanding: New from Richard Saul Wurman

Understanding Understanding
by Richard Saul Wurman
Publisher: Richard Saul Wurman and Jack Dangermond
Published July 30, 2017

From the author of Information Architecture, who says about his newest book: “This is a book for people to dip into, as they would walk in and out of the room of a dinner party and embrace their interests. . . Before the rules on how to organize information, before you learn grammar, before you work hard at expanding your vocabulary and go through the exercises of parallel meanings of things as using a Thesaurus and as one writes papers in class, before any learning one must understand.”

To order

The Hard Life by Jasper Morrison

The Hard Life
by Jasper Morrison
Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
Published in US: May 22, 2017

Photographs taken by designer Jasper Morrison of objects in the collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon, Portugal. “The objects photographed and described may be appreciated both for their beauty and for the example they set of design at its purest. The Hard Life is a continuation of Morrison’s celebration of the ordinary and offers a new perspective on his design philosophy.”

To order

Paula Scher: Works - Order from Unit Editions

Paula Scher: Works
Editors: Tony Brook & Adrian Shaughnessy
Design: Spin
Publisher: Unit Editions
Published April 2017

New book covering the career of of master designer Paula Scher, called “the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet.” (Ellen Lupton), This definitive, chronological visual record spans Paula’s early days in the music industry as an art director with CBS and Atlantic records; the launch of her first studio, Koppel & Scher; and her 25-year engagement with Pentagram.

To order

Type Tells Tales: New from Steven Heller and Gail Anderson

Type Tells Tales
by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published May 30, 2017

Reveals how type can become both content and illustration, as letters take the form of people, animals, cars, or planes. With numerous illustrations by F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Munari, and Francis Picabia, among others, as well as by contemporary designers such as Richard Eckersley, John Hendrix, Maira Kalman, and Corita Kent.

To order

The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design: New from Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio

The Moderns
by Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio
Publisher: Abrams
Published September 19, 2017

Featuring more than 60 designers whose magazine, book, and record covers; advertisements and package designs; posters; and other projects created the visual aesthetics of postwar modernity in America. Some were émigrés from Europe; others were homegrown; all were intoxicated by elemental typography, primary colors, photography, and geometric or biomorphic forms. Some are well-known, others are honored in this volume for the first time, and together they comprised a movement that changed our design world.