Source
Shooting America
Citation
Sontag, Susan. “Shooting America.” The New York Review of Books 21, no. 6 (18 April 1974).
Later revised and incorporated into On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). For the book compilation see src-sontag-1977.
Relevance
The third of Sontag’s five New York Review of Books essays developing what became On Photography. The essay addresses photography’s role in constructing national identity and the American documentary tradition — the tradition from which The Family of Man drew its iconographic stock. As the only mid-decade essay in the series (between 1973 and 1976), it represents the midpoint of Sontag’s sustained critical engagement with photography’s ideological function.
Tier 2: same grounds as src-sontag-1973-nyrb-photography.
Key excerpts / pages
- Access status (2026-04-30): WebFetch not permitted in this session. NYRB archive requires subscription. Body text NOT consulted in this round.
- No verbatim passages available from this session. Arguments attributed to this essay in secondary literature are carried from secondary citation, not from a primary fetch.
- Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: Sandeen situates the American documentary tradition within the Family of Man exhibition’s construction — NOT re-fetched for page-level verification in this round.
Notes
- Third in the five-essay NYRB series: (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” 1977.
- Cross-reference to
src-sontag-1977(book compilation);src-sontag-1973-nyrb-photography(first essay). - Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: anchor for 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 carried from standard bibliographic citation, not from a primary fetch.