Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
 GIFT October 12, 2009
James M Park
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
I have no idea what the book is about nor do I care, it was a gift and it was delivered to me in a relatively timely fashion (by this I mean mediocre; please keep in mind I am overseas with a military address/APO, AP). The end. Rating based on delivery only.
 Man-hating garbage November 25, 2008
T. Miller
4 out of 19 found this review helpful
One line on page 14 says: "The camera/gun does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff - like a man's fantasy of having a gun, knife or tool between his legs.
Wow, I've never had one of these fantasies so I guess I must not be a real man.
 Sontag November 13, 2008
Felicia Batzloff (USA)
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
Sontag
noesis between
a critique of bias accompaniment
modernity into seventies intellect
you all in a thought
prescribed reasoning from
a photographer's reference
she and Arbus
grotesque "single village"
absurd family arranged encumbered
a transparent place
twins are girls
women and dwarves
she conjures Sylvia and Jong
each line cast
another memorial made
bordered thoughts in earnest
image as object
a search
"timeless beauty"
the notion of
character study--history
its colleagues fantastic
wealth and Weston
the modern lover
understands what is new then
she and hisher newness
evidential master's pieces decay
something edible
hidden apparent
tangible counterparts
decisive like Bresson
ghostly layers of Nadar
she collects evokes
collecting the world
Genet and his criminals
possessing their pasts for
posits--her
translations and debut
help from Proust quoted friends
never met or maybe now in death
regarded as part
cannon of thinkers
makers in need included
heroes and heroines
"an ethics in seeing"
a cave of truths
she is evident
in explanation replenished
possessing past to a
defining present
Easy to criticize this book now, but it was the progenitor of the criticism of photography. November 4, 2008
P.S. Woods (Kansas City, MO United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
These essays helped the scholarship of photography get a fair shake. Even the publication of them in a book was a noteworthy entry in the history of photography. It is easy to look back now and criticize this book, which is basically an intellectual discipline in its infancy, but it remains important. I actually still enjoy the writing, which I find warm and inviting - not because of the tone, but because of the author's sense of adventure. It might be closer to a flight of fancy than a disciplined philosophy, but you have to start somewhere. I still think this is one of the best, most accessible reads on the subject.
ill-Timed and Irrelevant October 28, 2008
New England Yankee (Northern New England)
9 out of 18 found this review helpful
I originally purchased this book based on the extraordinary, glowing reviews - you know, the same ones on the back cover: "book of great importance and originality", "the most original and illuminating study of the subject", "raises important and exciting questions" etc. etc. etc.
Since buying it, I've attempted to plow through it at least 4-5 times, managing to get about 3/4ths through. And I LIKE philosophy and alternative thinking! The problem I think, is that much of what Sontag writes about photography is simply wrong. That leaves out what is self-contradictory, such as saying (as I would characterize it) in one place that modern and documentary photography is manipulative and exploitive, while elsewhere saying it is meaningless (at one point saying a photo of a dwarf is, after all, just a dwarf).
Photography as an art form - even without considering digital photography and up-to-date image manipulation and creation - is, like any art form, foremost about point of view. That's a commonplace notion that taught in photography texts and mentioned in countless art books. Sontag starts with this and points some of them out - the idealism of early photographers imitating painterly scenes, for example.
No problem so far. Where Sontag strays, however, is in assigning personal, cultural, and political motive to the points of view taken, and casting them in the worst possible light. So in her view the photographer becomes "aggrandized" as a "self-expressing ego", his work (put in the most over-wrought fashion) "a heroic copulation with the material world"! She even goes after the motives of snapshooting tourists, characterizing picture-taking as an anxiety-driven imitation of work! This sort of blue-in-the-face prose reminds me of nothing so much as conspiracy theorist and expose writing.
The book was ill-timed because it came just as the world was diving full-on into the internet, in the process transforming photography again. All of a sudden, photos, videos, graphics, and derivative and creative versions of them are embedded into everything we do, at every level of art and expertise, from every direction, and seemingly from everyone. In this world, the oppressive and heavy-handed motives Sontag ascribes to photographers and those who use images in evil ways are swept into irrelevance. It's not that such things don't exist - witness the controversy over the Time magazine cover shot of O.J. Simpson, as a small example - it's that when incidents like this are one among millions or billions in a world where people create their own connections, communications, and communities, and the old mainstream press and book publishing world has lost its position in the world, much of what she argues ceases to have importance even if you accept it.
My recommendation is to pass On Photography by. Chances are you won't get through it anyway.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
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