ABSTRACT
Sontag aims to understand the power of images in our image-suffused world. Sontag contemporized the previously established idea that photographs existed and circulated in their own world. Susan Sontag's writing in On Photography is polemical, autobiographical, opinionated, anachronistic, and oftentimes sends mixed messages. Susan Sontag does a convincing job of demonstrating that photography is a way of knowing the world. Despite her fame— or notoriety— in the realm of photo theory that came as a result of On Photography, the medium itself was a somewhat secondary interest for Sontag. On Photography is a case study for what it means to be living in the twentieth century in an advanced industrial consumer society. The originality of Sontag's writing lies in its ability to combine the aforementioned sources and to position them in conjunction with contemporaneous cultural phenomena such as the American War in Vietnam and the newfound acceptance of photography into museums.
