A companion to

On Photography by Susan Sontag

Annotations by Fritz Swanson


Susan Sontag, as painted in 1994 by Juan Bastos

Links to the Annotations, Sorted by Essay

The Essays:

  1. "In Plato's Cave" (Page 3-24)
  2. "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" (Page 27-48)
  3. "Melancholy Objects" (Page 51-82)
  4. "The Heroism of Vision" (Page 85-112)
  5. "Photographic Evangels" (Page 115-149)
  6. "The Image-World" (Page 153-180)
  7. "A Brief Anthology of Quotations" (Page 183-208)
  8. BONUS: Did Sontag steal all her best ideas from The Kinks? Scholars remain divided.

An Introduction to the Annotations

Beginning in 1973 and finishing in 1977, Susan Sontag set about writing a series of 6 essays on Photography for the New York Review of Books. Though the text is a work of criticism in a broad sense, it is not academic. There is no bibliography, and the works cited in the text are dealt with briskly, treating the previous 100+ years of photography as a whole corpus which the reader is presumed to be familiar with. She will refer to dozens, or even hundreds of works in a single clause.

It might be better to see the work as an abstract artistic enterprise, as much as it is an intellectual one. Or rather, it seems to conform to her own "sensualistic" view of criticism. As she famously said in her essay "Against Interpretation" "in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." (Which is to say, in part, that we have to remember that art is for pleasure, and not just for critics to pick apart as an intellectual exercise.)

While this may not exactly be an "erotics" of Photography, it may be something like a poetic response to Photography as a whole discipline up to the point of her last essay, published in 1977. However you might define the work, it was well respected in its day, and profoundly influential, winning the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism (1977).

I think the simpler description of the work is that it is a very educated, idiosyncratic and intense view of the art of Photography. Such a view can be contained in one mind because the art in question is so young, and its main practisioners are so few. As a consequence, reading the book is a bit like being cornered at a party by an extremely engaging, and very intense enthusiast who has about six hours of ideas she wants to convey to you in a single gulp of air. The whole time she is racing charmingly through her thesis, she presumes you should, and do, know every reference she is making, and you are too polite (and perhaps too embarrased) to correct her and ask for any clarifications and expansions.

And so, once you have disengaged from the mad woman at the party with all the wonderful ideas, you stumble away wishing you had taken notes, or that she had brought along a powerpoint presentation, or better that she could have, while talking, assembled a private museum for your personal viewing, and that she could have been the tour guide to lead you through.

Given that I very much wish I had been at that party, I have here started to assemble something of that Museum that would be necessary to fully appreciate what on earth she is banging on about.

I am using the Picador edition of ON PHOTOGRAPHY. ISBN: 9780312420093

My process has been to go through the book and highlight every direct reference to an art object or document. She's pretty clear about what she is talking about. Then I have made a list of the references below, in the order they appear in the book. Finally I have associated each item with a collection of links. Some of the links provide general context, some point to specific works of art. If a specific image is cited in the book, I have done my best to present that exact image here on the page.

The goal is that you should be able to read the book with this page open, and as Sontag proceeds through her argument, you should be able to scroll down through as many of the images as I can find. And if you want to pause and dig deeper into a specific artist or historic moment, you will have the links I think you will need to do that.

The book is a slender 200 pages. What I find so compelling about it is that if you take the time to parse all of its citations you will receive a very full education on the history of photography up to 1977, as well as an interesting cursory view of American history from the Victorian period to 1977. I think this says something very simple and very true about good criticism: it should be the fine point of a massive pyramid of thought.

Why bother to read this book, or care about these annotations? Because Sontag's prescient views both predicted and DEFINED what the next generation thought about photography. And since photography has become more rather than less important, Sontag becomes an essential starting point and touchstone for thinking about our present world. Sontag died the same year Facebook was founded, six years before Instagram was founded, and 10 years before the rise of TikTok.

Sontag herself inadvertently sets the standard for her own success when she paraphrases T.S. Eliot saying, "Each important new work necessarily alters our perception of the past." On Photograohy does that.

As you read Sontag, ask yourself, What would Sontag think of our world? What is consistent with her views? What defies her views? What takes her ideas, but complicates them in ways she could not have anticipated?

Just take any paragraph out of this book, and set it down next to any modern image and see what ideas are sparked for you.

(I hand coded this single page of annotations in HTML in the Summer of 2020. Material updates will be noted here.)


Susan Sontag, at a party, about to launch into a three hour rant about Diane Arbus and Walt Whitman

The Essays:

  1. "In Plato's Cave" (Page 3-24)
  2. "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" (Page 27-48)
  3. "Melancholy Objects" (Page 51-82)
  4. "The Heroism of Vision" (Page 85-112)
  5. "Photographic Evangels" (Page 115-149)
  6. "The Image-World" (Page 153-180)
  7. "A Brief Anthology of Quotations" (Page 183-208)

"In Plato's Cave" (Page 3-24)

"America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" (Page 27-48)

https://www.avedonfoundation.org/the-work

"Melancholy Objects" (Page 51-82)

"The Heroism of Vision" (Page 85-112)

"Photographic Evangels" (Page 115-149)

"The Image-World" (Page 153-180)

"A Brief Anthology of Quotations" (Page 183-208)

I have not yet decided how exactly to annotate this.

Did Sontag steal all her best ideas from The Kinks? Scholars remain divided. (SATIRE) (Otherwise known as: Sontag's ideas in other places)

The Kinks say:

Or, as Sontag would say:

"It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt." (15)

To which, The Kinks reply:

And Sontag says:

"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism." (9)

"Taking photographs fills the same need for the cosmopolitans accumulating photograph-trophies of their boat trip up the Albert Nile or their fourteen days in China as it does for lower-middle-class vacationers taking snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls." (9)

"Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today, everything exists to end in a photograph." (24)

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