Susan Sontag, On Photography

Leland Poague (Iowa State University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Domains

Photography (as art)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1977

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Commentary / Criticism (literary)
Essays/ Lectures (any)

Resources

Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) began as a series of articles—most of them reviews of books of or about photography–that appeared in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. Though Sontag is obviously well acquainted with canonical figures in the history of the medium (Daguerre, Talbot, Cameron; Stieglitz, Weston, Lange; Abbot, Avedon, Penn), her immediate prompt was an exhibition of Diane Arbus photographs at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1972. Not far in the background, however, is the national trauma of America’s military involvement in Vietnam, of which Sontag was a passionate critic (see Nelson 106-09, Menand 689-90). Her experience in the anti-war movement may well …

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6947 words

Citation: Poague, Leland. "On Photography". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 September 2021 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3061, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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