Tag: Susan Sontag

The “undiscovered,” the “forgotten,” and the “unsung”

Post author By Darin
Post date March 1, 2020

In 1974 Susan Sontag published her “Shooting America,” which included a critique of Bob Adelman’s Down Home and Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip. Along with Sontag’s reflections on documentary photographers’ predilection for the poor, she comments on the growing preference for “raw unliterary record” in both photography and writing. The emerging literary taste for “unedited […]

Quotation

Haunted by tacit imperatives …

Post author By Darin
Post date July 29, 2019

Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. … In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography, 6.