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On Photography | 
| Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $6.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 6219
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0312420099
Dewey Decimal Number: 770.1
EAN: 9780312420093
ASIN: 0312420099
Publication Date: August 25, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Ships immediately! Perfect and New! First Edition. 2001 Paperback.
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Product Description
Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as “a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” It begins with the famous “In Plato’s Cave”essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching “Brief Anthology of Quotations.”
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Self-enclosed, all-too-verbal critique divorced from subject... July 27, 2008
Sonntag's gift for language is explanation enough for why she probably took few pictures and certainly not enough to justify cramming image-making into the worn categories of reproduction, oppression, and escapism. If you've got nonverbal photographic friends all too assured of the purity of their craft, this book should play counterpoint nicely. Otherwise, consider this text another example of theory uncomfortably distanced from the object of its gaze.
 Choppy monograph - interesting ideas December 12, 2007
Sontag's On Photography was published in 1977. It includes six named sections which each tackle a slightly different subject. The sections were published independently as magazine articles years before the monograph was assembled--and this is plainly evident (which is my main 'complaint' about the text). The book does not feel or read like a book. It reads like a collection of six disparate essays that have been lightly edited for packaging as a book. The sections work OK as essays, but they fail somewhat as a monograph. For example, Sontag makes numerous assertions about photography which are stated as fact but not supported by any documentary evidence. While this is acceptable in an essay, in a monograph of this sort one would expect more academic rigor. Finally, each essay was clearly intended as an atomic piece and their collection in the book results in a large amount of re-hash of basic ideas at the start of every new section, as well as a very choppy flow between sections.
The book is dated (which is entirely understandable--but true none-the-less). Sontag makes a single fleeting reference to digital photography as a quirky alternate method of capturing images. The text's discussion on the pervasive nature of cameras assumes the pinnacle of technology to be the Kodak Brownie. While this was arguably once true, photography has been so changed by digital capture and truly pervasive cameras (think cell phones, etc.) that many of the ideas of the text are only partially developed by today's standards. Additionally, Sontag's insistence that photography is the accidental but obvious champion of the Surrealist takeover of the arts is also dated. Sontag's insistence on using 'big' words and complicates sentences to describe simple things is also somewhat irritating; the tone is unmistakably that of 1970s/1980s critical academia.
Having said that, the book occupies a fairly unique niche in the history of thinking about photography. As other reviews have noted, the subject material is (ahem) well focused on the topic and delivers interesting insight into various aspects of photography. It is unfortunate that Sontag did not more-fully edit the source materials into a cohesive text and at least attempt to look forward to a time when technological changes in process and artistic developments in taste could perhaps be different than the norms of the late 1970s.
 Amazing essays!!!! May 10, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I loved this book! It is so refreshing to read an unpretentious art criticism book. Her views are simple but breathtaking. The fact that one is reading essays about photography, written by someone who is not inside the art world, makes a huge a difference. She is not trying to create the new "it" artisitc concept, she's just speaking as a photography lover and admirer.
 Medieval European Scholar Ideas March 17, 2007
2 out of 16 found this review helpful
First this book should not ne taken seriously, it's meant to be just being critical about photography thats all, secondly even though author is American she sounds like European middle age scholar minded critic. Third, she doesn't know about fine art photography in depth, she only criticises and about 20-30 very famous photographers she knows of, she didn't taken into account most (almost all) modern photographers. Most of the time she sounds like a 19. century European painter just lost his job because of rising of photography, but also wants to learn about new technique called photography with a great frustration and misses his old job a lot.. Sontags background about philosophy and sociology didn't help much for a healhty criticsm of photography..
Good try for a criticism of fine art photography, I think every serious fine art photographer should read this book, because it teaches the way how the fine art photography could be criticised in a wrong way, and this book does a damn good job.
Excellent January 11, 2007
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Susan Sontag is the ultimate critic and reading "On Photography" is only beneficial to any aspiring photographer. The book has much to say about photography, applicable beyond the subject itself.
Worth reading!!!
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