On Photography

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

A new edition of Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking critique of photography—its problems, politics, and possibilities.

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed,” Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography, which went on to influence generations of theorists, film critics, and readers everywhere. Originally published in the 1970s, her groundbreaking collection remains uncannily prescient and profoundly precise.

With her singular searching eye, and her refusal to buckle under received wisdom, she presents a rousing critique of the functions of imagery—to seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to conspire, to conceal—across six essays. The result is a damning portrait of the ways we use imagery to manufacture reality and authority that feels as if it were written today.