The publications of the programme can be found in GARAGE Bookshop, in the main bookstores of Moscow: 'Moskva', 'Biblio-Globus', 'Molodaya Gvardiya', 'Moskovskiy Dom Knighi', 'Falanster', chain of bookstores 'Noviy Knizhniy', and in the Internet store.

Sontag examines the ideological effects of photography, comparing attempts to ‘catalogue the nation’ by German photographer August Sander in the 1930s and American Robert Frank towards the end of the 1950s, as well as works by Diane Arbus and photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. To demonstrate this fluidity, the photographer produces three photo essays, all made at the same event at the same time with very different narrative outcomes. The contemporary obsession with photography turns the public into ‘tourists and voyeurists’, with implications for both our private and public lives. Sontag deals with the dual nature of photography: as both a predatory attempt to appropriate another person’s reality and as a position of conspicuous non-interference as the person who documents the event is ultimately unable to influence its outcome. Photography is surreal by nature, and this surrealism is manifested in its very attempt to create a duplicate of the world a reality of the ‘second degree’, which, whilst limited, is even more striking. Sontag questions the flawed perception of this medium as an objective means of capturing experience: citing that a photographer’s work ‘gives rise to the same, often dark, deals between truth and art’, as painting or literature. In this collection of essays, Sontag deconstructs the stereotypes of photography – embedded within ordinary consciousness – and redefines the relationship between photography, reality, history and time. Posted about my SAB listing a few weeks ago about not showing up in search only when you entered the exact name. This famous collection of essays by Susan Sontag contemplates photography and its position in contemporary culture.

Susan sontag on photography essay