Rating: 
Summary: What more can be said?
Review: Sontag is amazing. She knows what she wanst to say and develops her ideas so well. Refreshing to read an intelligent person who knows how to write too.If you are at all interested in photography, art, modern culture, globalism, feminism, on and on, you should read this book. But be warned, it will change the way you look at and take pictures forever.
Rating: 
Summary: Enlightening and challenging
Review: Sontag is first and formost a philosopher. Her book is a series of essays that were first published in New York Magazine and later compiled for this book. As such, each essay is distinct and does segue easily to the next. Be prepared with these tools when digesting On Photography: a French dictionary, an English dictionary and a philosophy reference book i.e. Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. From the first essay, In Plato's Cave and onto through to Through Images Darkly (an analysis of Diane Arbus' work), once must be familiar with Plato's Republic and know what Arbus' photos look like. Be prepared to spend time with this book, it is well worth it!
Rating: 
Summary: Crazy like a loon
Review: Sontag represents a certain type of "intellectual" who is - thankfully - becoming increasingly rare in the world of google and broadband. As exemplified by Descartes (I think, therefore I am), this is the school of people who think that truth can be discovered solely through rumination - without doing any research, without experimentation, without any investigation of the world outside of your skull. It is pure subjectivity - gloriously self-referential and egotistic, completely self-contained and titannically self-satisfied. What Sontag's writings are about are Sontag - not the world as it is (and which can easily be fact checked) but the world as seen through the coke bottle lens of Sontag's ego and self. Sontag would hate the comparison but she is the leftist equivalent of the medieval christian mystic - the world outside of her own mind doesn't matter and facts have no weight. This is what enabled her - in one of the most egregious public acts of heartlessness in the last one hundred years - to praise the 9/11 terrorists for bravery while the World Trade Center was still smoldering and bodies were still being dragged from the debris. This was like praising the Nazi concentration camp managers for efficiency and thoroughness. Having distanced herself from humanity and decency with her warped and unbalanced intellect, the stunned response to her statements probably bewildered her completely. No matter as her crazed statements had plenty of precedents in her previous writings. She took the very cheap, easy, and elitist high road of condemning every wrong in the world - without ever offering any solutions and always, always, condemning the USA for actually trying to do something about these problems rather than just word process away safely in her study surrounded by the works of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Genet.
In Photography, Sontag is at the Acme of her (witch) craft. She thinks (and enough critics seemed to have agreed with her) that a well written sentence implies veracity as if the good sentence was a litmus test for truth; as if grammar and a good thesaurus conferred reliability, sanity, or common sense. It doesn't. She'll be forgotten. I think she would have appreciated that - joining the obscure writers that few people read, enjoyed, or valued. She was too elitist to have enjoyed it very much if she actually was embraced by the masses.
Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking and stimulating!
Review: The book has been considered a classic for over twenty-five years. Inspiring and thought-provoking, this set of six essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave," make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society. Enjoyed by word- as well as photo-enthusiasts, On Photography is a great book!
Rating:
Summary: important
Review: This book together with Nathan Lyons "Photographers on Photography", Giselle Freund's "Photography and Society", Petruck's "Camera Viewed", Trachtenberg -"Classic Essays on Photography", is essential reading for any student of photography at college level.
Rating:
Summary: An essential introduction to the importance of photography.
Review: This is the ONE book I always tell my students to read, not because they will be better photographers but, because they will be better equipped to see and understand how photographic images have influenced our culture and our self- images. This is now more important than ever in the age of digital photography and images which are crafted to manipulate our feelings and decisions to consume, vote, love and even whether we like ourselves. It establishes a consciousness about the subject which is incisive and memorable. It is a brilliant work and a great contribution.
Rating: 
Summary: AN PARODY OF FEMINISM
Review: To be photographed is not the equivalent of being raped. Ask any rape victim. This book is insulting and moronic.
Rating:
Summary: Pompous, elitist crap
Review: What a load of garbage. Equating a camera with a gun and the act of photography with a violent crime, is so ridiculous it does not even deserve to be discussed. She has no idea waht she is talking about.
Rating:
Summary: Pompous, elitist crap
Review: What a load of garbage. Equating a camera with a gun and the act of photography with a violent crime, is so ridiculous it does not even deserve to be discussed. She has no idea waht she is talking about.
| 
