On Photography: Susan Sontag on How Cameras Change Looking
Photographs are everywhere, and that is precisely Susan Sontag’s problem. First published in the 1970s and still the sharpest short book on the subject, On Photography asks what happens to looking when the camera has already flooded the world with images — shock, nostalgia, evidence, tourism, and the quiet habit of treating reality as something to be collected. For Sapiens Verbum readers who move between Commented Paintings and the prints on photography.sapiensverbum.com, it is the critical companion that sits beside the viewfinder.
Author: Susan Sontag
Title: On Photography
Format: Kindle eBook, available on Amazon.es
Scope: Six essays on photography’s ethics, aesthetics, and power — from “In Plato’s Cave” to a closing anthology of quotations
Amazon: amzn.to/4h7d8kK (ASIN B00CUOD7RC)
The Camera as a Way of Seeing
Sontag’s opening move is to treat photography not as a neutral record but as an aggression and an education at once. To photograph is to appropriate; to collect photographs is to collect the world at a safe distance. That distance is the essay’s real subject. She tracks how images teach us what counts as real, what deserves pity, what can be consumed as beauty, and how the sheer surplus of pictures can dull the very attention they claim to sharpen. The argument is moral without being moralizing: she wants you to feel the cost of looking through a lens that never stops.
Why It Belongs Beside Berger and the Print Shop
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing trains the eye on paintings, nudes, and publicity. Sontag trains it on the photograph as a modern social fact — the postcard, the news image, the family album, the tourist snap. Together they give Sapiens Verbum’s two visual shelves a shared grammar: question the frame, the caption, and the appetite the image feeds. Read a Galicia seascape on the photography blog, then read Sontag on how beauty and evidence trade places, and the print on the wall stops being only a souvenir.
Why Read It Now
The book is short enough for a weekend and dense enough to argue with for years — the right density for readers who already linger on single frames in Commented Paintings and fine-art prints. Pair it with any post on photography.sapiensverbum.com or a canvas from prints.sapiensverbum.com, and the camera’s claim to show “what was there” becomes the beginning of the conversation, not the end.
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