Theory: July 2006 Archives

Nearly every review of the current Sontag tribute show at the Met has mentioned that On Photography was fiercely resisted by the photography priesthood of the time when it was first published. And each time this has left me scratching my head as to why. On Photography was one of the first "serious" books I read about the medium when I got interested a few years back, so it serves as my foundational understanding for what photography is all about. The idea that Sontag's thinking about the medium would be heretical was pretty much unfathomable until I read Jed Perl's review of the show in the New Republic and he highlighted how strongly the Lens Work crowd was in sway at the time.

if On Photography got under people's skin, that was really because, whether you agreed with Sontag or not, she had tapped into the feverishness with which people were embracing photography. Sontag got at a truth that many people did not really want to admit, which was that their ardor for photographs eluded--shattered--all the old aesthetic categories. And then she went right ahead and suggested that photography was so variegated in its intentions and so unpredictable in its implications that it would probably elude any definition, aesthetic or otherwise.

(via Design Observer)