Photography
Citation
Sontag, Susan. “Photography.” The New York Review of Books 20, no. 17 (18 October 1973).
Later revised and incorporated as Chapter 1 (“In Plato’s Cave”) and/or Chapter 2 (“America, Seen through Photographs, Darkly”) of On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). For the book compilation see src-sontag-1977.
Relevance
The first of Sontag’s five New York Review of Books essays that collectively formed On Photography. As a discrete citable artifact, this essay introduced Sontag’s core thesis — that photography conditions a relationship to the world characterized by detachment and consumption — to a wide intellectual readership in 1973, four years before the book’s publication. The essay’s separate periodical identity matters for reception-history purposes: it documents the discourse as it unfolded, not as retrospectively collected.
Tier 2: Sontag is named in CREDIBILITY.md as “critical theory of record” for On Photography. The NYRB is a newspaper of record for critical theory purposes; named-author long-form essays qualify at Tier 2 under the “critical theory of record” rubric.
Key excerpts / pages
- Access status (2026-04-30): WebFetch attempted on
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/10/18/photography/— tool returned permission denied in this session. The NYRB archive is partly online but requires subscription for full text. No verbatim passage retrieved. Body text NOT consulted in this round. - Specific arguments attributed to this essay in secondary literature (cited in secondary literature but not independently accessed here): the opening argument that photography “creates a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world”; critique of the humanist exhibition format. These attributions are carried from secondary citation, not from a primary fetch.
- Page-level cross-reference to Sandeen 1995 (
src-sandeen-1995): Sandeen engages with the Sontag critique’s periodical origin — NOT re-fetched or verified against Sandeen in this round.
Notes
- The five NYRB essays in order: (1) “Photography” (18 Oct 1973); (2) “Freak Show” (15 Nov 1973); (3) “Shooting America” (18 Apr 1974); (4) “Photographic Evangels” (4 Nov 1976); (5) “The Image-World” (collected 1977 in book). Each essay is a discrete citable artifact separate from the 1977 book compilation.
- Cross-reference to
src-sontag-1977(book compilation). The book version revises and expands the NYRB essays; citations to specific arguments should prefer the book where page numbers are needed, but the NYRB essays are the historically prior publication. - Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: Sandeen is the anchor for situating the Sontag critique within the Family of Man reception history. verified: false: URL not fetched; full text not retrieved; body text NOT consulted in this round. Title, date, volume, and issue number are carried from standard bibliographic citation of the Sontag NYRB series, not from a primary fetch.