On Photography

On Photography is a 1977 collection of seven essays by American scholar, activist, and philosopher Susan Sontag. The essays were published in the New York Review of Books from 1973 to 1977 before publication in a single volume. Sontag explores the history of photography and its relationship to reality, the fine arts, and sociopolitical power structures. Individual essays explore these various relationships between photography and the world through a different lens before the culminating exploration of “The Image World”—the network of photographic media that mediates people’s relationship with reality—and a curated collection of photographers’ quotes. Sontag works to prove that photography is, like language, a medium, and that it’s often used to reinforce societal norms and the status quo in an industrial, consumerist society.

The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1977 and has shaped discourse on photography since its publication. It brings together disparate concepts of art and literary criticism, philosophy, and cultural studies to lay the groundwork for discussing photography and its wide-reaching implications in society. The essay collection explores several themes, including Consumerism and Contemporary Life, the relationship between

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