On Photography
Essays written for The New York Review of Books across the seventies, opening with 'In Plato's Cave.' Sontag argued that the camera changes the ethics of seeing: to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed, and a world collected as images becomes something ownable. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and every argument about images since, from war photography to the feed in your pocket, has had to route through it.
It is a book of verdicts, not arguments: the aphorisms arrive certain and unfootnoted, and either they strike you as true or there is nothing to argue with. There is not one photograph in it, which for a book about looking is either rigor or evasion. And Sontag herself filed the strongest objection: a quarter century later, Regarding the Pain of Others reassessed some of its central claims. Read them together and watch a great mind grade its own essay.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
