On Photography: FSG 80th Anniversary Special Edition

Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism, Susan Sontag's influential essays, heralded as "the most original and illuminating study of the subject" ( The New Yorker ).

"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed," Susan Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography, a groundbreaking collection which has gone on to influence generations of theorists, critics, and readers everywhere. Published in 1977, Sontag's seminal work, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, remains uncannily prescient and profoundly incisive to this day. With her searching eye and refusal to buckle to received wisdom, Sontag presents a rousing critique of the functions of imagery - to seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to persuade, to deceive - across sixformidable essays. The result is a complex portrait of the contradictory ways we use imagery to manufacture reality and authority, conveyed by her singular depth of analysis, that will endure for decades to come.

• Softcover
• 224 Pages
• Measures W13.67 × H20.96 cm / W5.38 × H8.25 in