Consider the poet Adrienne Rich’s letter to The New York Review of Books, objecting to Sontag’s 1975 essay on Leni Riefenstahl, “ Fascinating Fascism.” Dismissing Sontag’s suggestion that feminists bore some responsibility for turning Riefenstahl’s films into cultural monuments, Rich noted the “running criticism by radical feminists of male-identified ‘successful’ women, whether they are artists, executives, psychiatrists, Marxists, politicians, or scholars.” It was no accident, Rich implied, that “male-identified” values were embodied not just by Riefenstahl but by Sontag. Suspicious of her celebrity, and convinced that her success had rendered her immune to the plights of ordinary women, her critics have characterized her relationship to the second sex as inconstant at best and faithless at worst. The singular glamour of Susan Sontag has done her some injustice, particularly where matters of sex and gender are concerned. They offer us only the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas, and the world. They contain no ready-made ideas, no borrowed rhetoric-nothing that risks hardening into dogma or cant. Though the pieces are around fifty years old, the effect of reading them today is to marvel at the untimeliness of their genius. But the essays and interviews in “ On Women,” a new collection of Susan Sontag’s work, are incapable of aging badly. | Photography, Artistic.A certain anxiety besieges the critic asked to introduce a volume of earlier writings on women, lest she find the ideas expressed in them relics of a distant, less enlightened past. | Photography - Moral and ethical aspects. America, seen through photographs, darkly.She asks how the omnipresence of these images affects how we view the world, and how we have come to rely upon them to provide a sense of reality and authority in our lives. In these six incisive essays Susan Sontag examines the role that photography plays in society. They possess the power to shock or idealize, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence or to identify us.
On photography / Susan Sontag Book Bib IDīook, Online - Google Books
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