| Abstract: | Abstract Susan Sontag has been one of America's most influential and admired critics of literature, popular culture, and aspects of the fine arts. Her essays on pornography, 1950s science fiction films, and ‘new sensibilities’, are quoted on every college campus. Changes in her aesthetic or moral posture are registered by academicians with the same alarm with which financiers greet vacillations on Wall Street. For a trend-setting wordsmith, it is somewhat surprising that she comes so very late to photography, almost by accident, it would seem, into a field where Walter Benjamin, William Ivins, Jr., André Malraux, and other pioneering philosophers have already established the major parameters of commentary. What is astonishing, dismaying, and totally unexpected, is that she writes about photography as if she had just invented the subject. |
