My dad was an amateur photographer and retired university professor and he highly recommended this book of essays on photography by Susan Sontag. I wish I had made the effort to read it when he was alive, because this is exactly the kind of book that you want to discuss with someone: full of insight; references to photographers, philosophers and theorists; as well as some controversial hot takes. It's the kind of book you could build an entire college course around.

It's remarkable how much of Sontag's analysis is still relevant today, given the way that our image-based culture has grown so significantly since the 1970s, and given the changes in the photo production context. Her discussion of how and why people practice photography ("mainly [as] a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power"), and her description of the role of photographs and photography in a capitalist society particularly resonated with me.

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats...Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).

Of course the real trick is that everyone is an amateur photographer now, playing an active part as "every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation."

Sontag also provides tools for us to critique images around us in our own lives, for example by pointing out the importance of captions in situating photos:

The assumption underlying all uses of photography, that each photograph is a piece of the world, means that we don't know how to react to a photograph (if the image is visually ambiguous: say, too closely seen or too distant) until we know what piece of the world it is.

I've seen many photographic exhibitions and reserved forming an opinion of a photo until I realized the caption, but never realized that I was doing it or why, so this was an epiphany. Another theme that is helpful for our own deconstruction of photography is the debate about whether photographs represent the real or whether they are, in fact, the epitome of surrealism (Sontag seems to lean to the latter) because they flatten, freeze in time and crop the real but what comes out is nevertheless presented as real.

I was less interested in Sontag's discussion of how photography became validated as an art form, and the differences between photographs and paintings. These themes as well as the theme of real/surreal got a bit repetitive, presumably due to the fact that the six essays in this book were originally published as separate magazine pieces. I could also feel that some of her hot takes, including her scathing critique of Diane Arbus; and her section on photography in China, which conflates the Chinese state under Mao with "the Chinese", were a bit problematic and more one-sided than the rest of the book.

The book concludes with a "Brief Anthology of Quotations" on photography, including quotes from the likes of Ansel Adams, Schopenhauer, Louis Daguerre, Dorothea Lange, Baudelaire and Agatha Christie, interspersed with camera company advertising copy and newspaper excerpts. It's a touching and profound overview of the themes and schools of thought addressed in the essays, told in the subjects' own words.