Susan Sontag: Most writers do their best work early. And here's how Sontag herself thought about her writing: Julie Copeland: From Susan Sontag's 1977 Essays on Photography read by Ailsa Piper. What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to relieve. Although it was several years before I understood fully what they were about. Indeed, it seems plausible to divide my life into two parts: before I saw those photographs (I was 12) and after. Nothing I have seen, in photographs or in real life, ever cut me as sharply or deeply, instantaneously. For me, it was the photographs of Bergen, Belsen and Dachau, which I came across by chance in Santa Monica in July 1945. One's first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation the prototypically modern revelation. Unfortunately the ante keeps getting raised, partly through the proliferation of such images of horror. : Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Today it's the groundbreaking essays on photography by the formidable New York intellectual Susan Sontag.
This week's Artworks feature is the third in our series of art books and writing that have changed the way we see.
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