On Photography; Susan Sontag

On Photography by Susan Sontag was originally published in 1977 and I have the Penguin edition, published in London in 1979.  Sontag explains in her very brief introduction that the book is a collection of her essays.  She began with one essay and, almost by chance, this led to another and another....  These essays were first published in The New York Review of Books.

The blurb tells us that Sontag examines a wide range of problems, both aesthetic and moral, raised by the presence and authority of the photographed image in the lives of everyone in 1977.  John Berger in New Society says that it was the most original and important work yet written on the subject.  The Washington Post says of it that it is a brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographs have had in our way of looking at the world.  It has been suggested that that the book is literary and and contentious rather than being academic writing; it contains no bibliography, for instance, and very few notes and there is no in depth analysis of any one photographer and some critics such as writer and curator Colin Westerbeck gave it a hostile reception.

I enjoyed the book and could have wished that I had read it before writing my essay for Progressing with Digital Photography: The Rebirth of Pictorialism in Photography. Is a return to Pictorialism Finally Threatening the Dominance of 'Straight' Photography?  I would then have found the following quote useful:  "The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alienates with the wish to return to a more artisanal, purer past when images still had a handmade quality, an aura." and this: "....Right now there are mini-revivals of such long-despised pictorialists from another era as Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson and Robert Demachy."

Another quote with particular reference to my current work is: "Some photographers set up as scientits, others as moralists.  The scientists make an inventory of the world; the moralists concentrate on hard cases."  I think that maybe with the work I started on originally for my Body of Work is from the point of view of photographer as scientist, documenting and recording nature (I like to think well) rather than actually saying something, having a story to tell.