Susan Sontag. On Photography
Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors, and Regarding the Pain of Others, which are published by Penguin. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book trade. She died in December 2004.
Susan Sontag. On Photography
For Nicole Stéphany
It all started with one essay - about some of the problems, aesthetic and moral, posed be the omnipresence of photographed images: but the more I thought about what photographs are, the more complex and suggestive they become. So one generated another, and that one (to my bemusement) another, and so on - a progress of essays, about the meaning and career of photographs - until I’d gone far enough so that the argument sketched in the first essay, documented and digressed from in the succeeding essays, could be recapitulated and extended in a more theoretical way; and could stop.
The essays were first published (in a slightly different form) in The New York Review of Books, and probably would never have been written were it not for the encouragement given by its editors, my friends Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, to my obsession with photography. I am grateful to them, and to my friend Don Eric Levine, for much patient advice and unstinting help.
S.S.
May 1977
Susan Sontag. On Photography
For Nicole Stéphany
It all started with one essay - about some of the problems, aesthetic and moral, posed be the omnipresence of photographed images: but the more I thought about what photographs are, the more complex and suggestive they become. So one generated another, and that one (to my bemusement) another, and so on - a progress of essays, about the meaning and career of photographs - until I’d gone far enough so that the argument sketched in the first essay, documented and digressed from in the succeeding essays, could be recapitulated and extended in a more theoretical way; and could stop.
The essays were first published (in a slightly different form) in The New York Review of Books, and probably would never have been written were it not for the encouragement given by its editors, my friends Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, to my obsession with photography. I am grateful to them, and to my friend Don Eric Levine, for much patient advice and unstinting help.
S.S.
May 1977