Susan Sontag worried that photographs were replacing our memories
Tourists, Susan Sontag observed, snap pictures on holiday partly because clicking a shutter feels like a friendly imitation of work. That wry insight sits inside On Photography, one of several essay collections that made her among the most influential American critics of her generation, and often among the most argued with.
Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City on January 16, 1933, she lost her father to tuberculosis in China when she was five and later took the surname of her stepfather, an army captain. Books were her refuge from a distant mother. She finished high school in North Hollywood at 15 and graduated from the University of Chicago at 18, having married the sociologist Philip Rieff at 17 after a ten-day courtship. Graduate work at Harvard, a term at Oxford and a stint at the Sorbonne followed; she later called her time in Paris perhaps the most important period of her life.
Fame arrived through criticism. Her 1964 essay Notes on Camp lifted a taste for the absurd and burlesque into serious discussion, and Against Interpretation followed in 1966. After teaching at Columbia and elsewhere, she left academia to write full time. Although she regarded herself mainly as a novelist, her fiction was comparatively sparse. Her 1986 story The Way We Live Now remains an important piece of AIDS literature, and The Volcano Lover, inspired by old prints of volcanoes she found in a London shop, became a bestseller in 1992.
On Photography, published in 1977, argued that because almost everything has now been photographed, images have changed our sense of what we have a right to look at. Pictures widen access to distant places and history, she wrote, yet they can stand in for real experience and dull us to suffering. Decades later she pushed further: the danger is that people remember only the photographs, so that recalling a story gives way to calling up a picture. Illness as Metaphor, from 1978, and Regarding the Pain of Others, from 2003, carried those questions into disease and war.
She also wrote and directed four films, reported from the Siege of Sarajevo, and drew fierce backlash for some political essays. Sontag died on December 28, 2004.
Source: Susan Sontag
