ABSTRACT
When Susan Sontag's On Photography was published, critics had just begun to consider photographs worthy of attention. Among Sontag's peers there was a Marxist opposition to certain aspects of photography. A few years after the publication of Sontag's essays, Sekula would publish his most well-known essay "The Traffic in Photographs". At the time of Sontag's writing, most people understood photography as a window to the world. Photographs were distributed, for the most part, in magazines and newspapers or were made in the family and put into albums or slide shows for private consumption. Although photography had been accepted into mainstream museums, the implications of this, as well as questions concerning curatorial practice and organizational structures, were still being considered. On Photography examines multiple interpretations of photography beyond it being a modern medium, and is therefore considered the "full-blown American statement of postmodernist photographic theory".
