On Photography

Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism, Susan Sontag's influential essays, heralded as “the most original and illuminating study of the subject” ( The New Yorker ). “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed,” Susan Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography , a groundbreaking collection which has gone on to influence generations of theorists, critics, and readers everywhere. Published in 1977, Sontag’s seminal work, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, remains uncannily prescient and profoundly incisive to this day. With her searching eye and refusal to buckle to received wisdom, Sontag presents a rousing critique of the functions of imagery—to seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to persuade, to deceive—across six formidable essays. The result is a complex portrait of the contradictory ways we use imagery to manufacture reality and authority, conveyed by her singular depth of analysis, that will endure for decades to come.

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