
On Photography

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.
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.
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.
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Published: June 2020
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Publisher: Yale University Press
Forthcoming: October 2020
An intimate glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between Harriet Pattison and the renowned architect Louis Kahn. Harriet Pattison, FASLA, is a distinguished landscape architect. She was Louis Kahn’s romantic partner from 1959 to 1974, and his collaborator on the landscapes of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, and the F.D.R. Memorial/Four Freedoms Park, New York. She is the mother of their son, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn.
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Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: October 4, 2019
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By David Raizman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Published: December 2020
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By Rick Poynor
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: September 2020
A comprehensive overview of the work and legacy of David King (1943–2016), whose fascinating career bridged journalism, graphic design, photography, and collecting. King launched his career at Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, starting as a designer and later branching out into image-led journalism, blending political activism with his design work.
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Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: June 2019
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