Susan Sontag. Over fotografie

Susan Sontag

In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the corrosive role of photography in affluent mass-media capitalist societies, and refutes the idea that photography is just a sort of note taking. Sontag uses Depression-era documentary photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration as an example of the "predatory" nature of photographers, and claims that the FSA employees - most of whom were established photographers - "would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film --the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry."