Overview and Origins
On Photography is a collection of essays by the American writer and critic Susan Sontag (1933–2004), published in 1977 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The essays that make up the book originally appeared in The New York Review of Books over the preceding years, and were then revised and gathered into a single volume. The book consists of six essays, along with a concluding section, sometimes described as an anthology of quotations, titled “A Brief Anthology of Quotations.”
The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. It remains one of Sontag’s most widely read and influential works, and is frequently cited as a foundational text in the critical and theoretical study of photography.
Sontag was already a prominent public intellectual by the time of the book’s publication, known for essays such as “Notes on ‘Camp'” and “Against Interpretation,” collected in her 1966 volume Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Her characteristic mode was the essay of ideas—wide-ranging, aphoristic, drawing on literature, philosophy, and the arts—and On Photography extends this approach to the subject of the photographic image and its role in modern culture.
Central Themes and Argument
On Photography is not a technical history of the medium nor a study of individual photographers as artists in a conventional sense. Instead, it is a philosophical and cultural meditation on what photographs do—how they shape perception, memory, knowledge, and moral awareness. Sontag treats photography as a defining activity of modern consumer societies and examines its ethical and epistemological implications.
Among the book’s recurring concerns is the idea that photography is an act of appropriation—that to photograph something is to place oneself in a certain relation to the world that resembles possession or acquisition. Sontag draws on the language of predation and consumption, suggesting that the camera can involve an aggressive relationship to its subjects even as it appears passive or merely observational.
She is also concerned with the way photographs mediate experience, arguing that the proliferation of images can distance people from reality even as it seems to bring the world closer. A related theme is the question of whether repeated exposure to images—including images of suffering, atrocity, and war—dulls moral response over time rather than sharpening it. This concern with the ethics of looking at images of pain would be one Sontag returned to and partly reconsidered decades later.
Sontag reflects on photography’s relationship to reality and truth, examining the widespread assumption that a photograph provides evidence, a trace of something that actually existed, while also questioning the objectivity of the photographic image. She considers photography’s connections to tourism, to the family, to surveillance, and to the aestheticizing of the world, whereby anything can become a subject of beauty or interest through the camera’s framing.
The book also engages with the history and criticism of photography, discussing figures and tendencies within the medium and considering the relationship between photography and the other arts, as well as the way photography transforms notions of beauty and taste. Sontag connects the medium to broader currents in modern culture, including its links to a certain democratic and acquisitive ethos.
Style and Method
The essays are written in Sontag’s distinctive discursive, aphoristic style. Rather than building a single linear thesis, the book advances through a series of interlocking reflections, generalizations, and provocations. The closing “A Brief Anthology of Quotations” gathers statements about photography from a range of writers, photographers, and thinkers, functioning as a kind of montage that complements the essays’ arguments.
Significance and Reception
On Photography became a landmark in cultural criticism and is regarded as one of the most important critical works on the subject. It has been widely taught in courses on photography, media, visual culture, and aesthetics, and its arguments have been repeatedly debated, adopted, and challenged by later critics and theorists.
Within Sontag’s body of work, the book stands alongside her other essayistic explorations of culture and representation. It is often discussed in relation to her later book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), in which she returned to the subject of images of suffering and war and revisited, and in some respects revised, positions associated with the earlier work. Together, the two books frame Sontag’s sustained engagement with the moral and cultural consequences of the image across her career.
The influence of On Photography extends beyond photography criticism into broader discussions of media saturation, spectatorship, and the relationship between images and reality, and it continues to be cited as a touchstone in these fields.
