sontag essay on photography

‘On Photography’ by Susan Sontag |A Comprehensive Summary and Insightful Exploration

In the vibrant tapestry of human history, 1977 marked the birth of a masterpiece that forever altered our perception of photography. This was the year Susan Sontag, a luminary in the realm of critical thought, introduced us to her seminal work, “On Photography”. A collection of six essays, this book was not merely about the technicalities of photography, but rather, it delved into the philosophical underpinnings of this art form. It posed questions that continue to haunt us: What does photography truly capture? How do we discern a ‘good’ photograph? Can photography be equated with art? Sontag’s work, however, was not limited to posing these questions; it also offered profound insights into our relationship with images and how they shape our understanding of the world. Today, we invite you to embark on a journey through the pages of “On Photography”, a journey that promises to challenge your perceptions, provoke thought, and perhaps, even inspire a newfound appreciation for the art of photography.

For those of you who are pressed for time, fear not. This article offers a comprehensive summary of “On Photography”, distilling its profound insights into a succinct overview. It serves as a perfect starting point for those eager to delve into the world of Susan Sontag’s thought, but are constrained by the ticking clock.

The Genesis of a Masterpiece

Let’s take a trip back in time, to the year 1977. The world was a different place then, and amidst the hustle and bustle, a certain book was born that would forever change the way we perceive photography. This book was none other than “On Photography,” a collection of six essays penned by the brilliant Susan Sontag. Originally published in The New York Review of Books from 1973 onwards, these essays were a culmination of Sontag’s reflections on photography over several years.

Sontag, with her razor-sharp intellect and keen eye, delved into the very heart of photography, unearthing the aesthetic and moral dilemmas that lay at its core. She embarked on a journey through the annals of photographic history, taking us along for a ride through the great human, social, artistic, aesthetic, and technological adventure that photography represents. From the United States to Europe, she explored the creations of the great names that have left their mark on this medium: from Fox Talbot to Henri Cartier-Bresson , via Alfred Stieglitz , Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget , Edward Weston, and Nadar .

The Questions that Haunt Us

But what exactly does photography do? What does the photographer see on one side, and what does the viewer see on the other? According to what criteria is a “beautiful” or “good” photograph judged? Can such an activity be given the status of art? What does this image, which seems so easily substituted for reality, send back to us? These are the questions that have haunted photography for many decades, and it is thanks to Sontag’s detailed study that we find some answers.

Sontag’s approach to photographic realism, her reflections on the beauty and ugliness of subjects, contribute by their richness to further define this photographic question. And the influence of the image in our relationship with time will encourage us to take a different look at photography. Her work is a testament to the power of photography, not just as a medium for capturing reality, but also as a tool for understanding and interpreting the world around us.

The Legacy of “On Photography”

“On Photography” has had a profound influence on photographic thought. It has shaped the way we think about photography, and its impact can be felt even today. The book is a testament to Sontag’s genius and her ability to delve deep into complex issues and present them in a way that is both engaging and thought-provoking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the philosophical underpinnings of photography and its role in shaping our perception of reality.

In the end, “On Photography” is more than just a book about photography. It is a book about us, about our relationship with images, and about how we perceive and understand the world. It is a book that challenges us to think, to question, and to see the world in a new light. And for that, it will always hold a special place in the annals of photographic literature.

Comprehensive Summary of On Photography, by Susan Sontag

• In Plato’s Cave : Picture this: you’re in a cave, and the only reality you know is the shadows dancing on the walls. This is the metaphor Sontag uses to explore the world of photography. She takes us on a philosophical journey, questioning the very nature of reality as captured through the lens. Photographs, she argues, are but mere shadows of the truth, capturing a single moment frozen in time, but devoid of the full context. It’s like looking at a snapshot of a dance, beautiful but lifeless, without the music and movement that give it meaning. Susan Sontag delves into the ethical labyrinth of photography. Can we trust the reality presented by a photograph, or is it a manipulated perception, a tool in the hands of those who wish to shape our view of the world? It’s a thought-provoking exploration that leaves us questioning the very nature of reality itself.
• America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly : Imagine a kaleidoscope, each fragment a photograph, each turn a shift in perspective. This is how Sontag presents America through the lens of photography. She explores the power of photographs to both reveal and obscure the truth, creating a multifaceted image of the country that is as complex as it is contradictory. Susan Sontag takes us on a journey through the works of various photographers, each with their unique perspective, each adding a new layer to the image of America. It’s like peeling an onion, each layer revealing a new facet of the country, each tear a testament to the power of the image.
• Melancholy Objects : Have you ever looked at an everyday object and seen something extraordinary? This is the magic of photography that Sontag explores in this chapter. She discusses how photographers, like alchemists, transform the mundane into gold, capturing the beauty in the most ordinary of objects. But there’s a melancholic undertone to this beauty. Each photograph is a frozen moment in time, a reminder of the transience of life. It’s like looking at a sunset, beautiful but tinged with sadness, a fleeting moment captured forever.
• The Heroism of Vision : Imagine a world seen through the eyes of a hero, each moment an opportunity for greatness. This is the world of the photographer as presented by Sontag. She discusses the role of the photographer as a visionary, using their unique perspective to reveal the beauty hidden in plain sight. But this vision comes with its challenges. It’s a constant struggle to capture the essence of the world, to translate the complexity of reality into a single image. Yet, it’s this very struggle that makes the journey worthwhile, that transforms the photographer into a hero.
• Photographic Evangels : Picture a world where photographs are not just images, but powerful tools for social and political commentary. This is the world Sontag explores in this chapter. She discusses how photography has become a medium for expressing dissent, for challenging the status quo, for shaping our understanding of the world. She takes us through the works of various photographers, each using their lens to shed light on the issues plaguing society. It’s like looking at the world through a magnifying glass, each photograph revealing a new problem, each problem a call to action.
• The Image-World : Imagine a world saturated with images, each one vying for your attention. This is the world Sontag presents in this chapter. She explores the omnipresence of images in our daily lives, how they shape our perceptions, influence our behavior, and define our reality. She discusses the impact of photography on our relationship with the world, how it has transformed our understanding of reality. It’s like living in a hall of mirrors, each image a reflection of the world, each reflection a distortion of reality.
• A Brief Anthology of Quotations (Homage to W.B.) : Picture a mosaic of quotations, each one a piece of the puzzle that is photography. This is what Sontag presents in this chapter. It’s a collection of thoughts, reflections, and insights on photography, each adding a new layer to the discussion. It’s like listening to a symphony, each note a quotation, each quotation a part of the larger melody. It’s a fitting conclusion to the book, a reflection on the themes and ideas discussed, a testament to the power and impact of photography.

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Press release

On photography: a tribute to susan sontag.

A major force in New York intellectual life for more than 40 years, the novelist, essayist, and critic Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was renowned for her brilliant and impassioned writing on photography. From June 6 through September 3, 2006, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present an exhibition of some 40 photographs that celebrate Sontag's contribution to the history of the medium, featuring works from the Metropolitan's collection by a wide range of artists, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Robert Frank, Andy Warhol, and Peter Hujar.

Sontag's groundbreaking essays on photography were first published in the New York Review of Books and later collected in the award-winning book On Photography (1977). She revisited the subject in her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), reflecting on the complex ethical questions raised by photographs of war and disaster.

Nearly all of the wall texts presented in the exhibition are drawn from Sontag's vividly aphoristic prose. In some cases, the photographs relate directly to focused discussions of individual works, such as Robert Capa's Falling Soldier (1946), an icon of photojournalism taken during the Spanish Civil War. Also included are selected works by photographers Sontag wrote about at length, including Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, E. J. Bellocq, and Annie Leibovitz.

In other cases, small grouping of photographs provide visual complements to Sontag's broader insights and ideas about the medium. For example, a passage from On Photography commenting on the medium's inherent surrealism is accompanied by a haunting photograph of mannequins in a Paris store window by Atget; Eli Lotar's Slaughterhouses at La Vilette (1929); and a puzzle-like, 1960s street scene by Lee Friedlander.

Asked in 1975 why she decided to write about photography, Sontag said: "Because I've had the experience of being obsessed by photographs. And because virtually all the important aesthetic, moral, and political problems—the question of 'modernity' itself and of 'modernist' taste—are played out in photography's relatively brief history."

Because she came to her subject not as a photo-historian, but rather as a critic, an observer of culture, and a wide-ranging intellectual, Sontag's views were not – are not – universally accepted within photography circles, but they prompted a type of examination and discussion of the medium that was without precedent.

Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, several plays, a volume of short stories, and dozens of critical essays on subjects as diverse as photography, illness, avant-garde theater, the aesthetics of fascism, and the camp sensibility. She died of leukemia in December 2004.

May 15, 2006

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Tourists in our own reality: Susan Sontag’s Photography at 50

Lecturer in Philosophy, The University of Western Australia

Disclosure statement

Andrew Milne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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This year marks 50 years since Susan Sontag’s essay Photography was published in the New York Review of Books. Slightly edited and renamed In Plato’s Cave, it would become the first essay in her collection On Photography , which has never been out of print.

The breadth of Photography is immense. It ranges over artistic, commercial, photojournalistic, and popular uses of photography; and it discusses the photograph’s role in both sensitising and desensitising us to other people’s suffering – a theme Sontag reconsidered 30 years later in her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others .

But perhaps nowhere is Sontag’s enduring relevance as a critic clearer than in the essay’s analysis of photography as both a symptom and a source of our pathological relationship to reality.

Sontag described photography as “a defense against anxiety”. She saw that it had become a coping mechanism. Confronted with the chaotic surfeit of sensation, we retreat behind the protection of the camera, whose one-eyed, one-sensed perspective makes the world seem maniable.

Sontag claimed that we photograph most when we feel most insecure, particularly when we are in an unfamiliar place where we don’t know how to react or what is expected of us. Taking a photograph becomes a way of attenuating the otherness of a place, holding it at a distance.

Tourists use their cameras as shields between themselves and whatever they encounter. According to Sontag, photography gives the tourist’s experience a definite structure: “stop, take a photograph, and move on.”

Having taken a photograph, we think of its subject as our captive: it’s there now, on the film, in the camera’s memory. This can make us inept observers. There is no need to experience something now, as we can always review it later. So we grab and run.

Even if we compose carefully, if we “make” rather than “take” a photograph, we are likely to feel the release of the shutter as the release of a bond, as if we now can (or must) move on – to other photographs.

I was there

Photography is a way of testifying I saw this, I was there .

Kodak’s marketing through the early 20th century testifies to this urge. “Take a Kodak with you” was one of the company’s earliest slogans. By 1903, they were announcing that “a vacation without a Kodak is a vacation wasted”.

Sontag wrote:

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Through photography, Sontag argued, we sooner or later become tourists in our own reality. Sontag thought this happened mainly to the photojournalist, the person on constant lookout for their next subject. But it is true of most of us today. We have become discontents on the perpetual lookout for content. Photographic promiscuity is now one of our mores. It’s what we do: we shoot everything, not least ourselves.

In the revised version of the essay, Sontag says that “taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world.” Her claim is that photography has reframed the way we see the world and our place in it.

What we see is mediated by technology. When we look through the eye of the camera, everything is revealed as a possible photograph. This has an atomising effect: people and experiences appear discrete, the sort of thing suitable for collection in the miscellany of memory.

One way of approaching Sontag’s deeper point here is through her discussion of this Leica advertisement:

The people in the advertisement evince fear and shock, but the man behind his viewfinder is self-possessed. The promise is that the camera will make you the master of all situations. The Soviets crushing the Prague Spring, the Woodstock festival, the war in Vietnam, the winter games in Sapporo, the Troubles in Northern Ireland – all of these are “equalized by the camera”. They are reduced to the status of the “Event”: something that is “worth seeing – and therefore worth photographing.”

Read more: Richard Avedon, Truman Capote and the brutality of photography

An accessible world

Sontag was critical of a reduction that takes place in the lives of the viewing public (itself an extraordinarily telling phrase). She wrote that photographs have the effect of “making us feel that the world is more available than it really is”.

We see photographs of people and events that are remote in space and time. This may seem to bring them closer, but the sense in which they are made available is a highly mitigated one. Elsewhere in On Photography, Sontag speaks of a “proximity which creates all the more distance”. She argues that “it is not reality that photographs make immediately accessible, but images”.

Flicking through a photo magazine, we encounter a disorienting welter of subjects: the horrific, the erotic, the mundane. Everything jostles for our attention as tokens of one all-engrossing category: “the interesting”. This confusion is the ordinary condition of today’s compulsive screen-stroker.

Sontag’s complaint about the “levelling” effect of media is nothing new. It goes back at least to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s. At that time, new telegraph networks and faster printing presses meant that each morning more eyes were focussed on news about elsewhere. Kierkegaard thought that as we become more curious about distant events, our lives lose intensity. We cease to see ourselves as concrete individuals and become members of that abstraction “the public”, whose solitary duty is to be informed, to be conversant with the topics of the day.

Like Kierkegaard, Sontag’s purpose was, broadly speaking, ethical. She was concerned with our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. She thought that photographs were displacing us. What is furthest in space and time now reaches us as quickly as what is closest. It is not that the far has drawn nearer, but that everything is held at an equal distance. Our sense of situatedness has been upset. We are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere – an all-seeing, incorporeal eye. Our sense of orientation, our sense of what is relevant to us, has diminished.

This may give a false impression of Sontag’s argument. Her political commitment is beyond question (just read about her 1968 visit to North Vietnam, or her 1993 staging of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo). She was certainly not trying to justify inattention or insularity.

Sontag’s objection is primarily to the way we are transformed into, as she writes elsewhere, “customers or tourists of reality”. Our responsibility becomes perpetual consumption of what is served up by the media. We relate to the world beyond the media as if it were media, as if it were content.

Sontag’s criticism of “mediation” is, in part, about a loss of intensity. But more to the point, it is about (to use one of her key terms) a loss of complexity .

Contact demands more than an image hitting the eye. It requires immersion, it requires physicality, it requires understanding. Sontag envisages a responsibility beyond that of the so-called “concerned spectator”, whose attention she describes elsewhere as “proximity without risk”.

In a late interview, Sontag said that she was for “complexity and the respect for reality.” But what exactly does she mean by reality? Photography begins:

We linger unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, our age-old habit, in mere image of the truth.

For Plato, reality is a world of abstract ideas hidden behind sensory experience. His cave-dwellers are prisoners forced to watch flickering, evanescent images cast on the wall. Knowledge alone can loosen our bonds, allow us to discover the source of the illusion that we mistake for reality.

Sontag’s cave is a different proposition. It is the cave of the Cyclops and the Gorgon, where all that moves becomes ossified before that one enframing eye. What Sontag sought were not the truths of static facts, but those of lived experience. In the worn existentialist jargon, she was after authenticity in the relationship of the individual to themselves and to their society. She was also after presence , an immersion in the moment, so long as we do not assume this means the non-discursive presence advocated by her contemporaries in slogans such as “Be Here Now”.

Sontag was interested above all in enriching the sorts of stories which we tell ourselves and others. She was interested in “consciousness”, not in the narrow sense of the mind as opposed to body, but in the novelist’s sense of the narratives of embodied subjects. Understanding, for Sontag, is not a matter of taking things at face value, but a matter of interpretation. “Only that which narrates can make us understand,” she writes.

Sontag has a strong sense of the the interpenetration of mind and world. Her conception of consciousness is not Platonic but Proustian. How we look at things profoundly influences what we see. We are not extricable from what happens to us. Our present is pregnant with our past. The world is not a composite of objects out there , which can be put in our pockets. Our experiences are not objects in here , which can be filed away in the mind’s albums.

The psychological distance required to record an experience does not leave that experience unchanged. Not only that, but those recordings can come to dominate and displace our narratives, our memories.

Read more: Friday essay: my brush with Susan Sontag and other tales from the gay 'golden age'

Memories in flux

In the last of the On Photography essays, Sontag writes that photographs are “not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement”.

Our memories are in flux, our narratives are forever being rewritten. The photograph becomes iconic: as a tangible document to which we can return, it eclipses the subtle and always equivocal texture of multisensory association. That is what Aunt Léonie looked like. This is what happened on that trip to Combray.

Kodak knew this, too: humans forget, they said, but “snapshots remember”. To have a Kodak with you is to be able to capture the moment, to possess it. “They All Remembered the Kodak” – but perhaps it is all they remembered.

Our history thus begins to present itself as a set of snapshots, static events. Our memories are made readily available to us by the camera as things . But for Sontag, our memories are not possessions. Our memories possess us, haunt us.

Of course, photographs can haunt us too. In her last book, Sontag argued that we should let certain images do so. But her sense of the danger of what we might call a photographic relationship to reality is not only relevant today; it is liable to seem positively prescient.

The two decades since Sontag’s death in 2004 have seen the greatest changes in popular photographic practice since the Brownie brought photography to the masses a century earlier.

In 1973, Sontag spoke of the “omnipresence of cameras”. How does one trump a claim to ubiquity? When Sontag wrote that, only the most earnest shutterbug took their camera with them everywhere. But since her death cameras have become not only smaller but also indiscrete. The camera is no longer something one decides to pocket; it piggybacks on the presence of the smartphone.

The coupling of camera and internet has changed the nature of photography. Kodak tells us in a 2010 campaign that “the real Kodak moment happens when you share”. This marks an important shift in emphasis away from the experience one tried to capture and towards the experience of publicity.

We no longer have to wait to show others what we have seen. But more importantly, those others have changed. Not only can we show photos to more people, but the viewer no longer needs to be selected at all. Our audience has become vague: it is (that abstraction again) “the public”.

We now have a compulsion not only to record, but to share. And for what? Sontag said that everything exists to end in a photograph. Today everything exists to be scrolled past in a feed.

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On Photography

46 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“In Plato’s Cave”

“America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”

“Melancholy Objects”

“The Heroism of Vision”

“Photographic Evangels”

“The Image-World”

“A Brief Anthology of Quotations”

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

On Photography is a 1977 collection of seven essays by American scholar, activist, and philosopher Susan Sontag . The essays were published in the New York Review of Books from 1973 to 1977 before publication in a single volume. Sontag explores the history of photography and its relationship to reality, the fine arts, and sociopolitical power structures. Individual essays explore these various relationships between photography and the world through a different lens before the culminating exploration of “The Image World”—the network of photographic media that mediates people’s relationship with reality—and a curated collection of photographers’ quotes. Sontag works to prove that photography is, like language, a medium, and that it’s often used to reinforce societal norms and the status quo in an industrial, consumerist society.

The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1977 and has shaped discourse on photography since its publication. It brings together disparate concepts of art and literary criticism, philosophy, and cultural studies to lay the groundwork for discussing photography and its wide-reaching implications in society. The essay collection explores several themes, including Consumerism and Contemporary Life , the relationship between Art and Power Dynamics , and how photography shapes Surveillance and the Nature of Reality .

This guide uses the 2005 RosettaBooks eBook edition. Pagination may vary slightly in other editions.

Content Warning: On Photography contains racially biased depictions of Chinese people, Orientalism, and demeaning language toward marginalized groups and identities.

Sontag begins with “In Plato’s Cave,” which establishes her main premises and the theoretical foundation that runs through all the other essays. She explores photography through a comparison to Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which prisoners experience reality as a series of shadows cast on a wall. Like shadows, photographs overtake and supersede reality. Sontag posits that people compare everything to photographs and structure life as if always viewing the world through a camera lens. Sontag characterizes photography as a form of appropriation in that it allows photographers to take pieces of reality home with them. Cameras are tools of appropriation, exploitation, and intrusion into the lives of people who aren’t like the photographer. Sontag theorizes that this appropriation of reality and the idealization of the image has completely restructured society to prioritize surveillance and control through the use of images such as bureaucratic documents, CCTV, and more.

The second essay, “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” explores American photography’s obsession with kitsch, trash, and banal objects. Sontag relates current trends in photography and art back to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and his desire for people to see every speck of America as beautiful and relevant. Sontag calls this “euphoric humanism” and believes that this populist impulse leads to the appropriation of lives unlike those of the photographer. As an example, Sontag cites Diane Arbus , who made her fame from photographing marginalized people. Sontag believes that Whitman’s vision comes to fruition through photography in ironic ways that the poet couldn’t have foreseen. Sontag asserts that American photography is a form of colonization and tourism in the name of unifying the American experience.

“Melancholy Objects,” the third essay, examines the relationship between photographs as physical objects and the passage of time. Sontag believes that time makes photographs surreal, or hyper-real. She emphasizes that photographs capture a slice of time and keep it frozen, even while the photograph ages. This unique property of photographs allows families to be preserved as they were at one moment, even after family members age and die. Photographs shape people’s perspective on time by literally preserving slices of the past in ways that were impossible before photography. This relation to time leads to the desire to collect and catalogue the world around us, which feeds the American obsession with kitsch, banal objects, and outcasts. This strange relationship to time and impulse to catalogue leads back to Sontag’s idea of colonial tourists—photographers who colonize through the camera by capturing people, objects, and things foreign to their everyday life.

In the fourth essay, “The Heroism of Vision,” Sontag explores photographers’ own ideas about the power and purpose of their gaze as photo takers. Sontag believes that by the 1920s, photographers became “modern hero[es]” through their use of the camera because of society’s reorientation around the image. The valorization of the photographer led to questions of photography’s place in relationship to art. Photography entered into a reciprocal relationship with art, though many photographers disavowed the connection to maintain an aura of superiority to art.

“Photographic Evangels,” the fifth essay, examines the rhetoric that photographers use to insist on photography’s importance to the world and ingrain photography into everyday culture. Photography’s evangelizers approach the use of the camera as a higher-order intellectual activity of cataloguing the world, or as an intuitive and creative act that reveals more about the photographer than the subject. Sontag calls this the split between photography as art and photography as document. She breaks down the binarization of photography’s history, revealing that the two sides—artistic and scientific photography—are inseparable and have jointly reshaped art. Sontag believes that photography is a medium, like language, and not an art form in itself.

In the sixth essay, “The Image World,” the author zooms out to take a final look at photography’s effects on people’s perception of reality and its relationship to imagery . Sontag posits that photography has reoriented people to see the world as disjointed objects and experiences worthy or unworthy of photographing and recording. She argues that “reality” and its derivative, “image,” are concepts that shift and change within each culture over time. In an industrial capitalist society, Sontag believes that images supersede actual experiences of reality. The “Image World” becomes more real than reality, creating a market to sell endless entertainment and distractions from the unjust conditions of capitalist society, while the saturation of surveillance and images in everyday life makes population control easier than it was in eras before photography.

“A Brief Anthology of Quotations,” the final piece in the book, is a montage-style collection of various quotes and snippets on photography that Sontag curated from various figures, ranging from the inventors of photography to advertisements for cameras in the 20th century. Sontag uses these quotations to create an impressionistic portrait that shows how she formed her view of photography. The author took inspiration for this section from Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus The Arcades Project , an unfinished exploration of 19th-century Parisian life—and the effects of photography—that largely relies on montages of quotations.

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The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Susan sontag.

by Tresa Grauer , updated by Dory Fox Last updated June 23, 2021

In her essays, or "case-studies," examining art and the "modern sensibility," Susan Sontag covered topics from photography to illness to fascism. One of the most widely read cultural critics of her generation, she is pictured here on a visit to Israel to receive the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, an event which engendered much debate regarding her relationship with the Jewish community.

Institution: Jerusalem International Book Fair

Susan Sontag was born in New York City in 1933 and raised mostly in Los Angeles. She showed a voracious interest in literature at a young age and graduated from high school at the age of fifteen. She married while in college and had one son. After several years studying in Boston, England, and France, she settled in New York, where she had a highly successful literary career. Her essay “Notes on Camp,” about the quirky, high-low “camp” aesthetic, earned her early fame. Her book Against Interpretation (1966) further solidified her position as a public intellectual. She went on to write many books of essays, novels, and plays. Some of her most famous works deal with AIDS and illness, photography, aesthetics, and morality. Sontag was first diagnosed with cancer in 1975; after multiple recurrences, she ultimately died of leukemia in 2004.

Introduction

When her essays first began appearing on the American critical scene in the early 1960s, Susan Sontag was heralded by many as the voice—and the face—of the Zeitgeist. Advocating a “new sensibility” that was “defiantly pluralistic,” as she announced in her groundbreaking collection of essays Against Interpretation (1966), Sontag became simultaneously an intellectual of consequence and a popular icon, publishing everywhere from Partisan Review to Playboy and appearing on the covers of Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine . She became for many a cultural symbol, the image of the female intellectual; she herself would joke that she was best known for the white streak in her dark hair, rather than for anything she had written. In her work, she rejected the traditional project of art interpretation as reactionary and stifling and called instead for a new, more sensual experience of the aesthetic world: “an act of comprehension accompanied by voluptuousness” ( Against Interpretation , 29). Challenging what she saw as “established distinctions within the world of culture itself—that between form and content, the frivolous and the serious, and... ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture,” Sontag stood as a champion of the avant-garde and visual arts in particular ( Against Interpretation , 297).

As the only woman among the 1960s world of New York Jewish intellectuals, Sontag was both venerated and villainized, depicted as either a counter-cultural hero or a posturing pop celebrity. In a 1968 essay in Commentary , Irving Howe saw her as the “publicist” for a young generation of critics that was making its presence felt “like a spreading blot of anti-intellectualism.” Focusing on the woman rather than the work, other critics dubbed her “Miss Camp” (after her famous essay “Notes on Camp”) and “The Dark Lady of American Letters” (a moniker borrowed from Mary McCarthy). Indeed, in his 1967 book Making It , Norman Podhoretz snidely attributed her popularity to her gender and to the fact that she was “clever, learned, good-looking, capable of writing family-type criticism as well as fiction with a strong taste of naughtiness.” While Sontag’s public image later shifted from that of sixties radical to nineties neo-conservative, neither representation accounts for either the complexity of her views or the significance of her contribution to contemporary cultural debates—particularly on topics such as photography, illness, and the representation of suffering.

Sontag was the subject of intense media scrutiny throughout her career, despite her own consistent rejection of the biographical as a means of understanding a work. “I don’t want to return to my origins,” she told Jonathan Cott in an interview. “I think of myself as self-created—that’s my working illusion.” Her distrust of the potentially reductive nature of personal, biographical criticism was magnified by her insistence that she herself did not “have anything to go back to.”

Early Life and Education

Susan Sontag was born on January 16, 1933, in New York City, the older of Jack and Mildred (Jacobson) Rosenblatt’s two daughters. Her early years were spent with her grandparents in New York while her parents ran a fur export business in China. When she was five, her father died of tuberculosis and her mother returned from China. A year later, mother and daughters moved to Tucson, Arizona, in an effort to relieve Susan’s developing asthma. In 1945, Mildred Rosenblatt married Army Air Corps captain Nathan Sontag, the daughters assumed their stepfather’s last name, and the family left Arizona for a suburb of Los Angeles. Although her parents were Jewish, Sontag did not have a religious upbringing, and she claims not to have entered a synagogue until her mid-twenties.

The one autobiographical essay that Sontag published during her lifetime, “Pilgrimage,” depicts the writer’s long-standing sense of rootlessness and fragmentation as “the resident alien” in a “facsimile of family life.” It also expresses her feeling of intellectual isolation and her fear of “drowning in drivel” in suburban America. “Literature-intoxicated” from a very young age, she read the European modernists to escape “that long prison sentence, my childhood” and to achieve “the triumphs of being not myself.” Many of these issues—the fierce individualism of the intellect, the pleasure and nourishment to be derived from knowledge, and the question of what it means to be modern—became central themes in Sontag’s fiction and essays. These concerns are also on display in her posthumously published journals, which record her thoughts, beginning at age fourteen. The journals display a young writer brimming with both precocious intellect and recurrent self-questioning.

At age fifteen, Sontag discovered literary magazines at a nearby newsstand, and she described her excitement in an interview with Roger Copeland by explaining that “from then on my dream was to grow up, move to New York, and write for Partisan Review .” She achieved this dream in 1961, after twelve years in the academic world. Having graduated from high school at age fifteen, Sontag spent one semester at the University of California at Berkeley before transferring to the University of Chicago for the remainder of her college study. There she met Philip Rieff, a sociology lecturer, while auditing a graduate class on Freud. They married ten days later, when Sontag was seventeen and Rieff twenty-eight. Their only son, David, who would later be for some time her editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was born in 1952. That same year, Sontag entered Harvard as a graduate student in English and philosophy. After receiving master’s degrees in both fields (1954 and 1955, respectively), Sontag left her husband and son and spent two years studying at Oxford and the Sorbonne, although she did not complete a dissertation at either institution.

Shortly after her return to the United States in 1959, she divorced Rieff and moved to New York City, with “seventy dollars, two suitcases and a seven-year-old [her son].” As she explained in the interview with Jonathan Cott: “I did have the idea that I’d like to have several lives, and it’s very hard to have several lives and then have a husband. … [S]omewhere along the line, one has to choose between the Life and the Project.” In the final decade and a half of her life, Sontag had a relationship with her the photographer Annie Leibovitz , with whom she would sometimes collaborate artistically.

Literary Career

In New York, Sontag began establishing herself as an independent writer while teaching philosophy in temporary positions at Sarah Lawrence, City College, and Columbia University and working briefly as an editor at Commentary . She published twenty-six essays between 1962 and 1965, as well as an experimental novel, The Benefactor , in 1963. Although best known for her nonfiction, Sontag worked in many creative genres. The 1960s and 1970s saw the production of a second novel, Death Kit (1967), a collection of short stories, I, Etcetera (1978), and the script and direction of three experimental films: Duet for Cannibals (1969), Brother Carl (1971), and Promised Lands (1974). Promised Lands , a documentary on Israel’s The Day of Atonement, which falls on the 10 th day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei and is devoted to prayer and fasting. Yom Kippur War, was the only one of Sontag’s works that dealt explicitly with Jewish issues.

Sontag’s career-long series of essays—or “case studies,” as she called them in Against Interpretation —revealed an expansive and democratic definition of art, encompassing such diverse subjects as photography, illness, fascist aesthetics, pornography, and the Vietnam War. A self-described intellectual generalist, Sontag explained in an interview with Roger Copeland that her overarching project was to “delineate the modern sensibility from as many angles as possible.” Sontag’s writing was notable for its style, often aphoristic in character. Her essays ranged freely from high modernism to mass culture, from European to American artistic figures, from the aesthetics of silence to the contemporary media proliferation of images and noise. Her career as a writer was characterized by the tension between such oppositions: “Everything I’ve written—and done,” she explained, “has had to be wrested from the sense of complexity. This, yes. But also that . It’s not really disagreement, it’s more like turning a prism—to see something from another point of view.”

In both her fiction and her critical essays, Sontag told Copeland, she used such disjunctive forms of writing as “collage, assemblage, and inventory” to demonstrate her thesis that “form is a kind of content and content an aspect of form.” Insisting that interpretation is “the revenge of the intellect against the world,” Against Interpretation , her first collection of essays, sought to subvert both the style and the subject matter of traditional critical inquiry. The function of criticism should be to help us experience art more fully, she explained, “to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is , rather than to show what it means .” Against Interpretation introduced an American audience to lesser-known European figures such as Georg Lukács, Simone Weil, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. It also explored the irreverent playfulness and self-conscious artificiality of an underground camp aesthetic.

Styles of Radical Will (1969) advanced Sontag’s aesthetic argument by looking closely at pornography, theater, and film, and by examining the impact of self-consciousness on the modern art and philosophy of E. M. Cioran, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean-Luc Godard. But the collection suggested a political as well as an aesthetic mode of transforming consciousness. The essay “Trip to Hanoi,” originally published in 1968 as a separate book, was Sontag’s candid response to her trip to North Vietnam as she grappled with the limits of her own culturally formed perceptions. Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), which comprised seven essays of the 1970s, combined personal reflections on Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes with sustained analyses of Walter Benjamin, Antonin Artaud, and Elias Canetti. It also contained the well-known piece “Fascinating Fascism,” in which Sontag used Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films to discuss the ways in which history becomes theater.

Sontag’s award-winning volume On Photography (1977) analyzed how photographic images have changed our ways of looking at the world. Resistant to the acquisitive nature of photography and its consequent leveling of meaning, Sontag here displayed a growing suspicion of the “sublime neutrality” of art that she had so heralded in Against Interpretation . Although hopeful about the value of photography when it awakens the conscience of the audience, she was also concerned about its potentially predatory nature, explaining that “[t]o photograph people is to violate them.” Like On Photography, Illness as Metaphor (1978) broke new critical ground by examining the significance of a common cultural phenomenon, specifically regarding pain and suffering: in this case, the discursive representation of disease. Growing out of Sontag’s own diagnosis of breast cancer in 1975, the book sought to expose the fantasies and fears that are masked by the vocabulary of illness. In 1989, she elaborated on this theme in AIDS and Its Metaphors , which was received with some controversy. Many in the gay community criticized her efforts to disentangle the cultural metaphors of AIDS from its politics.

Sontag also focused her efforts on fiction and theater in these years. Unguided Tour, the film version of an earlier short story, appeared in 1983. In 1985, she directed the premier production of Milan Kundera’s play Jacques and His Master . Her own play, Alice in Bed , premiered in Bonn, Germany, in 1991 and was published in 1993. That same year, she traveled with her partner, photographer Annie Leibovitz to act, in her words, as a “star witness” during the Bosnian War. While there Sontag directed Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in war-besieged Sarajevo. Twenty-five years after the publication of her previous novel, Sontag’s critically acclaimed The Volcano Lover (1992) appeared, bringing together concerns that long animated her writing: the relationship between style and form, the moral pleasure—and service—of art, and the psychology of collecting. A historical novel with a self-consciously modern narrator, The Volcano Lover was a revisionary retelling of the eighteenth-century love affair between Lady Emma Hamilton and Lord Horatio Nelson that moved away from the abstraction of Sontag’s earlier fiction while still remaining a novel of ideas. Sontag’s final novel, In America (2000), which won the National Book Award for Fiction, was also set in the past; based on the life of a nineteenth-century Polish performer who immigrated to America with the dream of establishing a utopian community, the novel relied on the language of theater and acting in order to consider the thematic possibilities of re-inventing both the individual and the nation.

Sontag continued to write essays about photography toward the end of her life. She returned to the topic, first with an essay written to accompany a series of women’s portraits by Leibovitz (published as Women in 1999; an exhibition of the photographs then went on national tour), and then with Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), which discussed the ramifications of the near ubiquity of images of war. Her final work published during her lifetime was Regarding the Torture of Others (May 23, 2004), an essay in the New York Times Magazine about American soldiers’ torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Building on her body of work, she explored the moral ramifications of the seemingly banal, widely circulated, cell phone-captured photographs of this torture.

End of Life and Intellectual Legacy

Over the course of her career, Sontag remained committed to the idea of cultural criticism, explaining that it is “what being an intellectual—as opposed to being a writer—is.” Her contributions were recognized through numerous awards and grants, which included two Rockefeller Foundation Grants (1964, 1974), two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships (1966, 1975), the Arts and Letters Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1976), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1990), the Writers for Writers award (1998) and the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society (2001). In 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, after having been named an Officier in the same order in 1984. She received two additional European tributes in 2003—the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She served as a member of the selection jury for the Venice Film Festival and the New York Film Festival and was a founding member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Sontag also served as president of the PEN American Center from 1987 to 1989. When the Ayatollah Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death for his “blasphemous” book The Satanic Verses (1988), Sontag spearheaded protests on his behalf within the literary community. “Her resolute support,” Rushie said after Sontag’s death, “helped to turn the tide against what she called ‘an act of terrorism against the life of the mind.’”

Sontag’s cultural criticism took many forms and did not conform to a single political ideology. In the 1960s, her writing aligned with the avant-garde; in later years, she was frequently criticized for aesthetic and political conservatism. She publicly broke with the New Left at a town hall in 1982 when she denounced communism. Her politics consistently evaded categorization. “I don’t like party lines,” she explained in an interview published in Salmagundi . “They make for intellectual monotony and bad prose.”  In the early 2000s, Sontag was an outspoken opponent of the U.S. war in Iraq, and she criticized President George Bush’s response to the September 11th terrorist attacks within weeks of their occurrence.

While her consistent advocacy of critical autonomy did not itself mark a turn to the political right, toward the end of her career her insistence on being considered a universalist, and her refusal to be identified by gender, religion, or sexual orientation, did leave her outside crucial debates that fueled contemporary critical discourse. This suspicion of particularist affiliations placed Sontag at some distance from contemporary art and culture; however, it also stood as an unresolved tension within her own work. For example, despite her disavowal of feminism as “an empty word,” The Volcano Lover ends with the admission by a female character that “all women, including the author of this book … lie to [themselves] about how complicated it is to be a woman.” 

Although Sontag did not write explicitly about Jewish issues, Jews are frequently a point of reference in her writing, from which she drew analogies to other groups. Moreover, Sontag traced her personal interest in photographs of suffering (what she called an “inventory of horror”) back to seeing images of the Holocaust at the age of twelve. She wrote that “Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life— ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts”: before seeing the images and after ( On Photography 19-20).

Sontag’s relationship to the Jewish community received much attention in light of her selection as the Jerusalem prize laureate for 2001, particularly as Shimon Peres’s claim that “[F]irst she’s Jewish, then she’s a writer, then she’s American” ran counter to her own self-definition. Furthermore, Sontag’s willingness to accept an award that is “given to writers whose works reflect the freedom of the individual in society” from Israel—a country frequently criticized for violating those same individual rights—raised significant political protest, most notably from left-wing Jewish women’s organizations who saw her acceptance of the prize as “a tacit legitimization of the occupation.” Lashing out at this suggestion, Sontag used the occasion of the award ceremony to criticize Israel’s actions in the territories, accepting the prize “in homage to all the writers and readers in Israel and Palestine struggling to create literature made of singular voices and the multiplicity of truth.” This response, in turn, raised the ire of the right, who attacked her criticism of Israel as the words of a “perfect example of a self-hating Jew.”

Thus, while the “particular” was clearly a matter of concern for Sontag and her critics, Sontag refused to limit herself to any single critical perspective. In her acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, she explained, “If literature has engaged me as a project, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories of concern.” What she wrote of Roland Barthes applied well to her own project: “The point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure” (“On Roland Barthes,” xvii).

Sontag, who had suffered from cancer intermittently for thirty years (she had been told after her original diagnosis in 1975 that she had a ten percent chance of surviving for two years), died of complications of acute myelogenous leukemia on December 28, 2004, two weeks shy of her seventy-second birthday. Leibovitz photographed Sontag’s final days, as she was caring for her, and published images of Sontag on her deathbed in the book A Photographer’s Life:1990-2005 (2006), to some controversy. This would be but the first in a series of posthumous biographical and autobiographical works about Sontag. These include her journals, edited by her son and published in two volumes ( Reborn covers 1947-1963 and As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh covers 1964-1980), a play, Sontag: Reborn (2013), based on the journals, an authorized biography, and a documentary film. Sontag has continued to inspire reexamination in as many forms as she herself engaged in.

Of the woman who once described a writer as one who should be “interested in everything,” the New York Times wrote: “What united Sontag’s output was a propulsive desire to define the forces—aesthetic, moral, political—that shape the modernist sensibility. And in so doing, she hoped to understand what it meant to be human in the waning years of the twentieth century.”

Selected Works

Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus &Giroux, 1966.

Trip to Hanoi. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.

Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.

Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978.

“Pilgrimage.” New Yorker (December 21, 1978): 38–54.

Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980.

A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982.

AIDS and Its Metaphors . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.

“Why Are We in Kosovo?” New York Times Magazine , May 2, 1999.

Women , photographs by Annie Leibovitz, essay by Susan Sontag. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999.

“The Talk of the Town,” by Susan Sontag et al. The New Yorker, September 24, 2001.

Where the Stress Falls. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.

Regarding the Pain of Others . London: Penguin, 2003.

“Regarding the Torture of Others.” New York Times, May 23, 2004.

Novels and Short Story Collections

The Benefactor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1963.

Death Kit. New York: New American Library, 1967.

I, Etcetera. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978.

“The Way We Were,” The New Yorker , 1986.

The Volcano Lover. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992.

In America. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.

Alice in Bed: A Play in Eight Scenes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993.

Films and Filmscripts

Duet for Cannibals (1969).

Duet for Cannibals: A Screenplay (1970).

Brother Carl (1971).

Brother Carl: A Filmscript (1974).

Promised Lands (1974).

Unguided Tour (1983).

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 , ed. David Rieff. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries, 1964-1980 , ed. David Rieff. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012.

Angelos, Moe. Sontag: Reborn. New York: The Builders Association, 2013.

Aronowitz, Stanley. “Sontag versus Barthes for Barthes’ Sake.” Village Voice Literary Supplement (November 1982): 1+.

Brooke-Rose, Christine. “Eximplosions.” Genre 14:1 (Spring 1981): 9–21.

Brooks, Cleanth. “The Primacy of the Reader.” Mississippi Review 6, No. 2 (1983): 289–301.

Cole, Teju. “What Does It Mean to Look at This?” NYTimes , May 24, 2018.

Contemporary Authors. Vol. 25. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research Co., 1989).

Emre, Merve. “Misunderstanding Susan Sontag.” The Atlantic , Sep. 9, 2019.

Fox, Margalit. “Susan Sontag, Social Critic with Verve, Dies at 71.” NYTimes , Dec. 28, 2004.

Hentoff, Nat. “Celebrity Censorship.” Inquiry 5, No. 10 (June 1982): 8.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37.

Holdsworth, Elizabeth McCaffrey. “Susan Sontag: Writer-Filmmaker.” Dissertation Abstracts International 42 (April 1982), Ohio State University, 1991.

Hollander, Paul. Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba 1928–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Howe, Irving. “The New York Intellectuals.” Commentary 46 (October 1968). Reprinted in Selected Writings 1950–1990 , by Irving Howe, 267-268. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

Kalaidjian, Walter B. “Susan Sontag.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism , edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Kendrick, Walter. “In a Gulf of Her Own.” The Nation (October 23, 1982): 404.

Kennedy, Liam. Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Kramer, Hilton. “Anti-Communism and the Sontag Circle.” New Criterion 5, No. 1 (September 1986): 1–7.

Kramer, Hilton. “The Pasionaria of Style.” The Atlantic 50, No. 3 (September 1982): 88–93.

Kaplan, Alice. Dreaming in French. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Kates, Nancy. Regarding Susan Sontag . New York: Women Make Movies, 2014.

Light, Steve. “The Noise of Decomposition: Response to Susan Sontag.” Sub-stance 26 (1980): 85–94.

Linkon, Sherry Lee. “Susan Sontag.” Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, edited by Ann R. Shapiro et al. New York: Greenwood, 1994.

Lopate, Phillip. Notes on Sontag. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Manson, Aaron. “Remembering Susan Sontag.” Literature and Medicine 24, no. 1 (2005): 1–4.

Moser, Benjamin. Sontag: Her Life and Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Moser, Benjamin. “The Pictures Will Not Go Away’: Susan Sontag’s Lifelong Obsession with Suffering.” The Guardian , Sep. 17, 2019.

Nelson, Cary. “Soliciting Self-Knowledge: The Rhetoric of Susan Sontag.” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1980): 707–729.

Nelson, Deborah. Tough Enough . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Podhoretz, Norman. Making It (1967). Cited in Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion , by Liam Kennedy, 133. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Poague, Leland, ed. Conversations with Susan Sontag . Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Rich, Frank. “Stage: Milan Kundera’s ‘Jacques and His Master.’” NYTimes , January 24, 1985, C19.

Sayres, Sohnya. Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Shapiro, Ann R. ed. et al., Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook . New York: Greenwood, 1994).

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How to cite this page

Grauer, Tresa and Dory Fox. "Susan Sontag." Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women . 23 June 2021. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on August 17, 2024) <http://qa.jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/sontag-susan>.

Susan Sontag

(1933-2004)

What Is Susan Sontag Known For?

Susan Sontag was born on January 16, 1933, in New York City. In 1964, she gained recognition for her essay “Notes on Camp.” Sontag became widely known for her nonfiction works including Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), On Photography (1976) and Illness as Metaphor (1978), as well as for novels like The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000), for which she won the National Book Award. Sontag died from cancer on December 28, 2004, in New York.

Early Life and Education

Susan Sontag was born on January 16, 1933, in New York, New York to Mildred and Jack Rosenblatt, with the couple later having a second daughter, Judith. Sontag’s father was a fur trader, and her parents lived overseas for his business while Sontag lived with her grandparents in New York. Sontag's father died when she was still a child. Her mother moved the family to milder climates because of Sontag’s asthma and they eventually relocated ato California. In 1945, Mildred married Air Corps captain Nathan Sontag, from whom a pre-teen Sontag would take her surname.

Sontag became an avid reader and learner. She graduated high school at the age of 15 and attended the University of California at Berkeley before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she met lecturer Philip Rieff. The two were married in less than two weeks after meeting and would have a son, David. Upon earning her bachelor’s in philosophy, Sontag went on to earn her master’s in English and philosophy at Harvard and did additional postgraduate work abroad at Oxford and the Sorbonne.

'Notes on Camp'

Sontag returned to the states by the late 1950s and opted to end her marriage with Rieff, moving to back to New York City with her son. She worked as a college instructor and began to make a name for herself as an essayist, writing for publications like The Nation and The New York Review of Books . A piece she wrote for The Parisian Review , “Notes on Camp,” earned her accolades. She had also been working on her debut novel, The Benefactor , released in 1963 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontag’s publisher for the duration of her career.

As an intellectual and a woman in what was still too often a boys’ club, Sontag challenged traditional notions of how art should be interpreted and consumed and what cultural tropes could receive serious scrutiny. She was a renaissance soul as known for everything from collections of nonfiction prose like Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966) and On Photography (1977) to fiction like I, etcetera: Stories (1978) and The Volcano Lover (1992). She also wrote and directed films, including Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Letter from Venice (1981).

National Book Award

Sontag was the source of much controversy throughout her career, with critics looking at everything from her political statements (i.e. she once offered words of support for communist governments, changing her stance later on) to the amount of attention she received from the general media.

Relationships, Illness and Death

Though Sontag took on sexuality-based cultural criticism, she was generally private about her affairs and enjoyed intimate relationships with women, including Eva Kollisch and photographer Annie Leibovitz , with whom she collaborated on the book Women (1999).

Sontag was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 1975. She detailed how myths around the disease can derail effective treatment in the book Illness as Metaphor (1978), later followed by another book about health and stigma, AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989).

Sontag died from a form of leukemia on December 28, 2004, in New York City. Her son David, who went on to become an editor and a writer as well, paid tribute to Sontag in the book Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008).

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Susan Sontag
• Birth Year: 1933
• Birth date: January 16, 1933
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: New York City
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Susan Sontag was a critical essayist, cultural analyst, novelist and filmmaker. She wrote 'On Photography,' 'Illness as Metaphor,' 'The Volcano Lover' and 'In America,' among many other works.
• War and Militaries
• Education and Academia
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Fiction and Poetry
• Politics and Government
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn
• The Sorbonne
• Oxford College
• University of Chicago
• Harvard University
• Nacionalities
• Occupations
• Anti-War Activist
• Death Year: 2004
• Death date: December 28, 2004
• Death State: New York
• Death City: New York City
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Susan Sontag Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/susan-sontag
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 26, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is the zone of freedom.
• I did have the idea that I’d like to have several lives, and it’s very hard to have several lives and then have a husband. … [S]omewhere along the line, one has to choose between the Life and the Project.
• If literature has engaged me as a project, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories of concern.
• It never occurred to me that I would want to marry someone who didn't like someone who read a lot of books.

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Essays of the 1960s & 70s

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Susan Sontag

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• Jewish Women's Archive - Biography of Susan Sontag
• Los Angeles Times - Obituary of Author Susan Sontag
• National Endowment for the Humanities - Susan Sontag, Essayist and So Much Else
• Amercian Society of Authors and Writers - Biography of Susan Sontag
• Susan Sontag - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Susan Sontag (born January 16, 1933, New York , New York, U.S.—died December 28, 2004, New York) was an American intellectual and writer best known for her essays on modern culture .

Sontag (who adopted her stepfather’s name) was reared in Tucson , Arizona, and in Los Angeles. She attended the University of California at Berkeley for one year and then transferred to the University of Chicago , from which she graduated in 1951. She studied English literature (M.A., 1954) and philosophy (M.A., 1955) at Harvard University and taught philosophy at several colleges and universities before the publication of her first novel , The Benefactor (1963). During the early 1960s she also wrote a number of essays and reviews, most of which were published in such periodicals as The New York Review of Books , Commentary , and Partisan Review . Some of these short pieces were collected in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (1966). Her second novel, Death Kit (1967), was followed by another collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will (1969). Her later critical works included On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989). She also wrote the historical novels The Volcano Lover: A Romance (1992) and In America (2000).

Sontag’s essays are characterized by a serious philosophical approach to various aspects and personalities of modern culture. She first came to national attention in 1964 with an essay entitled “ Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in which she discussed the attributes of taste within the gay community . She also wrote on such subjects as theatre and film and such figures as writer Nathalie Sarraute , director Robert Bresson , and painter Francis Bacon . In addition to criticism and fiction , she wrote screenplays and edited selected writings of Roland Barthes and Antonin Artaud . Some of her later writings and speeches were collected in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (2007).

Susan Sontag. Under the Sign of Saturn

• Language Russian
• Edition 3000
• Binding Paperback

The collection comprises some of the key critical essays written by Susan Sontag between 1972 and 1980. 

The book includes Sontag’s texts exploring her emotional experience of Paul Goodman’s death, intense memories of Roland Barthes, an essay on Walter Benjamin, and a thorough study of Antonin Artaud’s philosophy and art. It also features a critique of Hitler’s favorite film director Leni Riefenstahl (most famous for the propaganda pictures Triumph of the Will and Olympia ), as well as a brilliant analysis of the antifascist Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977) directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. In these recognizably explicit texts, Sontag reflects on death, art, history, imagination, and writing as such. 

Susan Sontag  (1933 – 2004) was an American writer, critic, cultural philosopher and political activist. She achieved widespread recognition through her collections of essays, Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2004).