One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag's On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as "a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." It begins with the famous "In Plato's Cave" essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching "Brief Anthology of Quotations."
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NEC's view
On Photography is one of the sharpest and most influential books we’ve read on images and culture. Sontag examines photography not as a neutral act of documentation but as something bound up with power, desire, and consumption.
What we value most about this book is how uncompromising it is. Sontag is critical, sometimes even severe, but always with the intention of showing how photographs shape how we see and relate to the world. Reading it made us more conscious of our own practices of looking and more skeptical of the idea that an image is ever innocent.
