Sontag's reception - essayist Susan Sontag - Sontag's On Photography at 20

The initial critical reception of Susan Sontag's upon Photography (1977) is one of the greatest in quantity extraordinary events in the history of photography and cultural criticism. No other photography volume not even The Family of Man (1955) which sold four million copies before finally going on the outside of print in 1978, received a wider range of pres coverage than upon Photography. The scores of reviews of Sontag's work extended not only across the representation of specialized photography and art magazines - that is, from Popular Photography to Artforum - on the contrary also across an expansive range of general-interest and intellectual periodicals from the Christian Science Monitor to the Village Voice, from Esquire to clash and from the Saturday Review to the Antioch Review. What's more, upon Photography won the National volume Critics' Circle Award for 1977 and was pick outed among the top 20 works of 1977 by the editors of the fresh York Times Book Review.

Perhaps no photography volume - certainly no book about photography - has been analyzed and discussed with more intensity, from for a like reason many different and competing perspectives, as upon Photography. No reader, apparently, was left unmov or unprovok through it. Consider, for example, the reception that upon Photography has received in this publication. In addition to the sum of two units essays in this issue, Afterimage has published four strikingly different articles upon or about On Photography. The first, Dru Shipman's "Sontag upon Photography" (January 1975) is not, strictly speaking, a review of upon Photography; rather, it is an obsessive, point-by-point rebuttal of the first four of Sontag's seven essays about photography for the of recent origin York Review of Books (six of these essays, of course, became upon Photography). Although not nearly as long-winded as Shipman's article (which, incidentally, took up nine pages of the 20-page issue), Michael Lesey's January 1978 review is equally if not more hostile. Like several other prominent answers to On Photography from the art-photography world - namely, Colin L Westerbeck Jr.'s 1978 Artforum review and Robert Heinecken's 1978 photomontage portrait - Lesey tries to discredit Sontag's volume by revealing it to be, as the title of his review place it, "an unacknowledged autobiography" as if the personal essay were somehow or other a criminal act. An abrupt about-face was signaled in the third and fourth Afterimage articles about upon Photography: David L. Jacobs's "Sontag Re-Viewed" (Summer 1978) and John McCole's "Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and the Radical Critique of Photography" (Summer 1979) In accord with Jacobs, McCole terminates that "the issues she raises will have to be faced, not sole by radical critics, but through anyone who thinks and cares about photography."

That upon Photography achieved a particularly broad and intense critical reception is indisputable. That Sontag's collection of essays is still sold and read (it is commonly in its fourteenth English-language edition), and is available in numerous foreign-language translations (13 at last count) is equally certain. What is disputable and uncertain, however, is the complicated matter of in what manner On Photography has been received by means of U.S. critics and scholars since that initial flaw of reviews, panels, symposia and other commentary in the mid- to late 1970 The question is: by what means important, influential or authoritative is the work for currently active critics and scholars? Or, what is upon Photography's critical reputation today? Apart from polling or interviewing these quicks there are two easier still more reliable ways of gauging Sontag's reception.

The first mode involves counting all the anthologies that contain extracts or sections from On Photography, or reprints of Sontag's original essays for the novel York Review of Books, the presumption being that anthology editors and publishers are themselves authoritative arbiters of intellectual reputations. As individual might expect, Sontag's writings are reprinted in greatest in quantity of the major anthologies that be rent asunder upon the scene in the late '70 and actual early '80s; these include The Camera Viewed: Writings upon Twentieth-Century Photography (1979), Classic Essays upon Photography (1980) and Photography in Print (1981) Since 1982 however, small in number of the significant anthologies contain writing by the agency of Sontag - not Reading into Photography (1982) not Thinking Photography (1982) not The call in question of Meaning (1989), and not The Critical Image (1990)

Operating upon the same premise as the above, a next to the first way of estimating the critical reception of upon Photography entails searching through the relevant journalism and scholarship and counting all of the citations to Sontag's photography writing. While I have not been able to do an exhaustive search of this literature, everything I have ground clearly suggests that the trail of quotations and footnotes races parallel to the trail of anthologies. In the late '70 and early '80 for instance, single can locate references to upon Photography in many important articles and exhibition catalogs, and in works such as Max Kozloff's Photography & Fascination (1979) A. D Coleman's Light Readings (1979) Frank Webster's The fresh Photography (1980) and Jonathan Green's American Photography (1984) by the agency of the early '90s, however, specific concerns to On Photography have all on the contrary disappeared from the critical and scholarly literature.