On Photography

This book of essays examines how photographs change what people notice, desire, and believe they know. Sontag treats the camera as an instrument of collecting, tourism, surveillance, and family memory, and she discusses how images of war, poverty, and celebrity circulate. She writes about photographers such as Diane Arbus and Walker Evans, and about the tradition that claims photography as art, arguing over whether a picture documents, aestheticizes, or replaces the thing photographed. The pieces are critical essays, not a history of cameras. The central concern is the ethics and appetite of looking in a culture flooded with still images.

Bound in dark grey cloth blocked on cover with a black & white photographic label. Yellow slipcase.