Reviews

• Insightful

  Vintage Sontag--good writing, insightful, and pertinent now more than ever.

• こういう時代だからこそ

  ゾンタグの写真論には言葉で映像に対決する、という姿勢があります。ジュディス・バトラーが2009年に出したFrames of Warで、アブグレイブ刑務所の写真についての章で、このOn PhotographyとRegarding the Pain of Others、それからゾンタグ自身が死の直前にNYタイムスに寄稿したアブグレイブ写真についての論考について考察していたのが、大変面白かったので再読しました。ゾンタグには文章と写真のどちらが優れているか、と考えるようなところがあって、それをバトラーは批判していましたが、たぶん追悼の意味もあったのか、大変尊敬して書いているように伺えました。近代化と資本主義、写真という物の捉え方、眼差しが対象をモノとしてしか扱わないということ、これらはゾンタグにとって、互いに切っても切れない関係にあります。だから彼女はダイアン・アーバスの真剣さを認めていても、アーバスのものの見方に厳しい評価をします。アントニオーニの文革のころの中国のドキュメンタリー映画についてもそうです。この映画、当時は中国当局に糾弾されましたが、ゾンタグが亡くなるころ、当局は評価を改めて、アントニオーニを表彰しました。今や広告だらけで日本のものと変わらない中国のビデオシェアサイトにアップされていたりします。こういう時代だからこそ、もっと読まれて良い本だと思います。

• Great for cultural theorists and photographers.

  Sontag is relevant even today.

• The book seemed like its in a bad condition like its a used book.

• On Photography is less a book about photography itself than a study of perception, distance, power, and modern consciousness. Sontag examines the camera not merely as a tool for documentation, but as something that fundamentally alters the way people experience reality, memory, suffering, beauty, and even one another. What stands out most is the density of the thought. Nearly every essay contains ideas that continue unfolding long after reading: photography as acquisition, as aestheticization, as emotional buffering, as evidence, as consumption. Even decades after publication, many of her observations feel uncannily contemporary in an image-saturated culture. Sontag also writes with extraordinary intellectual compression. The prose is elegant and sharp without becoming ornamental, capable of moving from cultural criticism to philosophy to psychological observation within a few sentences. The writing demands attention, but rewards it repeatedly. What gives the book lasting force is its refusal to treat images as neutral. Again and again, Sontag interrogates what it means to look at suffering, to collect moments, to transform experience into representation. The questions become ethical as much as aesthetic. At times the arguments feel deliberately severe, even skeptical of photography’s emotional claims, but that tension is part of what keeps the work alive. The book resists easy resolution and instead sharpens awareness itself. It remains one of the most intellectually influential works ever written about images—not because it explains photography technically, but because it reveals how deeply photography shapes modern ways of seeing.

• Each page of the book impelled me to go out there and take millions of pictures, but it also made me question the role of photographers and the ethics of the profession. Breathtaking insights. I'd really want to know what Susan Sontag would have to say about the "selfie generation".

• Susan Santag ci ha mostrato vari casi che usiamo le foto. Questo libro mi ha aiutato molto per la mia tesi sulla fotografia. Tutti pensiamo di saper fare le foto, ma bisogna pensare bene prima di fare quel "clic".

• ...have yet to read it though. Got it based on some ytuber who praised it, will see......

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