On Photography was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1977, collecting six essays originally published in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and remains the single most influential work of photographic criticism — the book against which every subsequent theorist of the image (Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography) has defined themselves.
Sontag’s argument is multi-layered and deliberately uncomfortable. Photography, she contends, is not merely a way of recording the world but of consuming it: the camera transforms experience into image, making everything available for aesthetic appreciation regardless of its content. Photographing suffering aestheticizes it. Photographing poverty appropriates it. The tourist with a camera does not see — she collects. The accumulation of photographs creates not knowledge but a simulacrum of knowledge: the feeling of understanding without the substance of engagement.
The essays move from Plato’s cave (the analogy between photographs and shadows) through the history of the medium (Stieglitz, Arbus, Weston, Riis) to its contemporary saturation. Sontag examines the relationship between photography and capitalism (both accumulate; both abstract), photography and imperialism (the camera as instrument of possession), photography and death (every photograph is a memento mori — it records what was, which is no longer).
The book’s influence extended far beyond photography criticism into media studies, visual culture, and the ethics of representation. Its arguments about image saturation — written before the internet, before Instagram, before the smartphone — proved prophetic: the world Sontag described, in which images replaced experience, has since arrived with a completeness even she might not have predicted.
Collecting On Photography
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1977): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $75–$200
- Signed first edition: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $15–$40
- Advance proof: $100–$250
A foundational text in visual studies. Demand remains strong in both academic and photography-collector markets.