On Photography
These days, photography feels like one of the most important vehicles to build The Society of the Spectacle and social media are oversaturated by photographs.
It was not always like this. Through Sontag's eyes, one can understand photography in quite a different way. To me, this book contains some ideas that may change how I look at photographs fundamentally.
Sontag touched, in these insightful essays, some key points of photography. Most of them deal with photography's relation to art. In her view, photography (though denied by many proponents) is a modern art. It embodies modernism more than painting and poetry in permissiveness and ambiguity of aesthetics, subject matter, and expertise.
She also explored the social side of photography quite a bit, especially how tourism, memory-making, etc fundamentally changed after the wider acceptance of photography.
It is a pleasure to read. Sontag can express quite succinctly her point with a storyteller's captivating charm.
Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism. One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, "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."