Sontag, Susan

About the American author Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

Susan Sontag was born Susan Lee Rosenblatt in New York City. She was a writer, essayist, publicist, and director known for her advocacy of human rights and as a critic of cultural and social conditions and government in the United States of America.
Her 1975 essay, 'Fascinating Fascism,' garnered record circulation in the New York Review of Books. In it, Sontag described, among other things, how infused with fascist ideology was Leni RIEFENSTAHL's style. As one reason for the director's comeback, she identified an increasingly strong cult of beauty in society. An exhibition of Diane ARBUS's photographs at the Museum of Modern Art led to years of intensive study of the medium of photography by the author. From 1972 to 1977 she wrote seven essays on the subject, which appeared individually in the New York Review of Books and were eventually published in the anthology 'On Photography'. The book was named one of the 20 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review and received other awards.
Alongside 'Die helle Kammer' by Roland Barthes, 'Über Fotografie' became a widely read classic of photographic theory. In 2003, she took up the subject of photography with the volume 'Looking at the Suffering of Others', which consists of nine essays. Here she dealt in detail with war photography and so-called shock images. She returns to some of her views from the 1970s, in part to revise them.
In early 2004 Susan Sontag was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, probably caused by radiation therapy on the occasion of her last cancer. Despite low chances of success, she still decided to have a bone marrow transplant, but this failed. Susan Sontag died in New York at the end of 2004 after months of suffering at the age of 71 and was buried at the Cimetière Montparnasse in Paris.

Writings on photography by author Susan Sontag

• 'On Photography' (1977, 1978), 1980, 2008, 2018); 'Regarding the Pain of Others' (2003)

read more