Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was born on 16 January 1933. She established herself as a public intellectual in the early 1960s, publishing her first major work — the essay "Notes on 'Camp'" — in 1964. Her writing set a mode of critical engagement that moved across art, politics, and culture without settling into any single discipline. She wrote essays and fiction, made films, and was drawn to areas of conflict; she wrote and spoke about the Vietnam War, and her scope extended to photography, culture, media, illness, and human rights.

Between 1973 and 1977, Sontag published a series of essays in the New York Review of Books examining photography's role in capitalist societies. Collected as On Photography in 1977, the book analysed how photographic images shape perception, compress history, and produce a particular relationship between viewer and subject. She drew comparisons between photographers — contrasting Diane Arbus's work with Depression-era documentary photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration — to show how intention and context alter what photographs do. The book reframed critical thinking about images and remains a standard reference in the field.

Sontag continued writing, teaching, and engaging with political conflicts throughout her career, including travelling to Sarajevo during its siege. Later works — among them Illness as Metaphor and Regarding the Pain of Others — extended her inquiry into how language and images mediate suffering and political reality. She died on 28 December 2004. Her books remain in print and are taught widely in art criticism, media studies, and philosophy; On Photography in particular has shaped how successive generations approach the ethics and politics of the image.