While Sontag delved into a few photographers’ careers, she was most prescient in her broader discussion of the medium’s proliferation. Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America.” Photography, in Sontag’s mind, can offer a meaningful condemnation of the absurdities plaguing an entire society. “The subjects of Arbus’s photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. “All her subjects are equivalent,” wrote Sontag. She discussed Diane Arbus at length, who photographed people Arbus affectionately called “freaks,” from the inner city to the suburbs. Yet not all photographers Sontag commented on simply captured subjects at opposing ends of the economic spectrum. A forthcoming biography on the writer, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life (2019), further solidifies her as a formidable thinker and character-teaser press for the book asserts that in her twenties, she wrote a major biography on Sigmund Freud, for which her husband received all the credit. Her 1964 essay-turned-book “Notes on Camp,” a radical dissection of a particular sensibility, helped make her name-and inspired this year’s Met Gala theme.Alternately celebrated and derided during her life, Sontag became an icon herself: chic, queer, vocal, and brilliant.

In addition to her work on the subject, Sontag became famous for her anti-war essays, plus writings on illness and camp. The origins of her interest in photography are still debated and analyzed. She had no formal training in art or photography-she studied English and philosophy at Harvard-but immersed herself in the New York cultural scene from 1959 onward. Writer Tom Wolfe once called her “just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style.” Scholar Camille Paglia accused her of becoming “synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing.” Nevertheless, Sontag’s radical thoughts on photography are as potent as ever.īorn in 1933, Sontag wrote plays, essays, and fiction until her death in 2004. Though it is now regarded as a seminal art-historical text, Sontag was neither an art professional nor an academic: She was alternately celebrated and derided as a “public intellectual.” Her cogent writing style and full embrace of her status as an amateur allowed her ideas to seep into the mainstream-though she found many detractors.

Sontag’s 1977 collection of essays entitled On Photography is perhaps the most prescient and influential book ever written on the medium.

On photography by susan sontag