ABSTRACT
Susan Sontag was a celebrity literary icon who wrote a lauded range of cultural criticism. Sontag's On Photography represented an important moment in photographic criticism. Its first incarnation was as a series of essays written for the New York Review of Books. Sontag's novel exploration of the medium stems from the ways in which she questions the power of photography, our addiction to it, and its capacity to render the real. "The power of On Photography—is owed in part to the liberating fact that Sontag's subject was capacious enough to allow for such a free-flowing exchange with an expanding audience. In the 1970s, when Sontag was writing her essays on photography, the subject was ripe for the picking, with an appeal in equal parts high and low. "Jed Perl", "The Middle Distance". Sontag would later revisit the problems that came with interpreting photographs in Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), the last major work of non-fiction published before her death.
