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Rating:  -
Susan Sontag is the ultimate critic and reading "On Photography" is only beneficial to any aspiring photographer. The book has much to say about photography, applicable beyond the subject itself.
Worth reading!!!
Rating:  -
I purcheased this book for my son who needed it for his photography class in college. He has found it easy to understand and very imformative.
Rating:  -
I was forced to read this drivel for a graduate photo program. God I wanted to kill myself and quit photography by the time I was finished with it.
If you want to read great photographic essays try Bill Jay's work. Amazing, insightful and filled with a sense of humor.
Rating:  -
Susan recants many of the things she says in On Photography in her book Regarding the Pain of Others published in 2003.
Rating: -
I opened this book very neutrally--I had never heard anything about Susan Sontag except her name, in a preface to an Annie Leibovitz book. I still can't believe some of the things I read. Sontag mentions in the foreword that she has an "obsession" with photography. I would argue that she has an obsession with resenting photography.
She begins by comparing a camera to a gun and the act of taking a picture to rape. To a certain point, I can understand this--being photographed is a very self-conscious experience. But somehow, I think rape victims would laugh at this comparision. Self-consciousness is not exactly rape. Also, she seems to believe that all photography is taken completely without the consent of the subject(s); they are innocent victims being raped by guns. The last time I checked, most of the photographers she mentions (Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Edward Weston, Julia Margaret Cameron) took pictures only with express permission, and many (Eugene Atget, Ansel Adams, etc.) did not take pictures of people at all. Almost all good pictures, with the exception of Henri Cartier-Bresson type photography, requires tacit consent between photographer and subject.
Sontag's resentment seems to come mostly from the resentment generated by photography's replacement of writing in description. Specifically, she says that whereas photograpy "steals" the pain of others, writing uses only one's own pain. This is funny, since I remember reading about how Jane Austen's neighbors complained because their lives were being stolen for her books. Ever since the art of storytelling began writers and storytellers have been "stealing" other people's lives, their pain, etc. Fitzgerald used Zelda's insanity just as David Bailey photographed Marie Helvin. I believe that the art of writing and the art of photography are incredibly similar, and Sontag sounds very sour grapes. How is Strand's photographing the famous "Blind Woman" different from Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood?"
My biggest objection to Sontag, however, is her lack of either proof or explanation. She simply states opinions as if they were facts, and then stops. For example, according to Sontag, Weston is now regarded as antiquated and cliche. Really? Somehow I thought, considering the worth of his work, his exhibitions in museums, and the wealth of books devoted to him, as well as his inclusion in every basic photography class, that he was still very highly regarded. I'm sure that Sontag regards him as antiquated and cliche, but this is very different from the "everyone" she generally to be present and in full agreement with her.
Sontag also concentrates exclusively on one genre and attacks photography as a whole through that genre. Diane Arbus's photos are apparently taking horrible advantage of everyone pictured in them, and are freakish visions of a bleak world--therefore all photographs in the world are taking horrible advantage and are freakish visions of a bleak world. I can understand why some people find Arbus's photos terribly offensive, but I think only the extremely deluded would use her as representative of all photography.
One last aspect of Sontag's book, which I found the most offensive, is her assumption that a picture is stealing the pain of others and, in a sense, profiting from it artistically. This is despite her inclusion in her "Anthology of Quotations" of Richard Avedon's interview where he stated that the pictures he took of other people were more about him than about them. Everyone who has ever practiced photography with any passion can testify to the truth of this statement, hence my conclusion that Sontag has probably never really picked up a camera. Look at Avedon's pictures of a tortured Marilyn Monroe, and then read Arthur Miller's "After the Fall," which describes a tortured and pill-popping Marilyn Monroe. There is very little difference, except that in Avedon's pictures Monroe still retains some amount of dignity, whereas in Miller's play she becomes a demon of hysteria and cruelty. In the end, although I am both a photographer and a writer, I would say that writing has ten times the power of misrepresentation and "stealing the pain of others" than does photography.
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