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1-Page Summary of On Photography
Overall Summary
This book is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag, first published in 1977. It brings together a series of nonfiction pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. Each essay addresses the question “Is photography simply a journalistic process of capturing real-world events in visual form—or is it a high art on the level of painting and sculpting?”
The first essay in this book is about Plato’s cave. In it, the author explores what images are and how they relate to reality. From Sontag’s perspective, photos are not reliable narrators or trustworthy documentation of specific places and times because viewers do not have a comprehensive idea of what was happening during the photo-taking process. She also warns against placing too much trust in photos; ultimately, there is more going on behind any photo that we can’t see as well as questionable intentions from the photographer which we can’t know entirely.
In “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” Sontag discusses photography and how it is used to assign importance to people or moments in time. She looks at the work of photographers like Diane Arbus and Alfred Stieglitz.
“Melancholy Objects” explores surrealism in photography. Photographers take what they see literally, but some use their art to bend and shape reality. The essay discusses the distance between viewers and subjects as a gulf that can’t be crossed—until now. Surrealist photographers present their own ideas about beauty by trying to bridge this gap.
In “The Heroism of Vision,” Sontag discusses how photography is the most important art form in modern times. She believes that because a photograph is intended to be truthful, it can capture an image as beautiful as it wants to be and satisfy our innate desire for both truth and beauty. Sontag examines various methods used by photographers, such as printing techniques and angles, to demonstrate this point.
This book asks whether photography is an art or a science. It explores the arguments of both sides and concludes that we’ll keep asking this question as long as there are photographs to enjoy, inform, entertain, and frustrate us.
Sontag offers another theory in her final essay. She questions whether photographs and reality are one and the same. If they’re not, then photos must be intimately connected to reality because at some amount of reality is captured in a photo. This means that photography is an act of acquiring information, memories, emotions, and events—a way of dealing with the present moment by linking it to the past as seen through a photo.
The book ends with a collection of quotes on photography. However, Sontag presents what may be the most definitive insight into the major themes of On Photography. She writes near the end of the book, “The final reason for needing to photograph everything is that it’s a truly capitalist art form.” Photography creates more supply and demand every time someone takes a picture. Is that enough to grant it equal status as other types of art? Or should we leave photography alone and let it function without human intervention?
On Photography is a book with many ideas and theories. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, but it was also criticized for its arguments against war photography. Sontag later published Regarding the Pain of Others, where she refutes her earlier views on war photography.
