American essayist, critic, novelist, filmmaker, and public intellectual; the most important American essay-critic of the second half of the twentieth century, and the writer who, more than any other, made the essay on culture — photography, illness, interpretation, war, spectacle — a form in which ethical argument and aesthetic attention were not separate activities but the same one.
Sontag was born in New York, raised in Tucson and Los Angeles, entered Berkeley at fifteen, transferred to Chicago, married the sociologist Philip Rieff at seventeen (they divorced in 1959), took graduate degrees in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, and settled in New York in 1959. Her first essay collection, Against Interpretation (1966), announced the program: a polemical defense of the sensuous surface of art against the American critical habit of translating works into their paraphrasable "meaning." The title essay's last sentence — "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art" — became the most quoted critical sentence of its decade. "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), from the same collection, gave a name to an aesthetic sensibility that had not previously been analyzed in print, and in doing so changed how popular culture was discussed.
On Photography (1977) is the book on which her reputation most securely rests. Written as a sequence of six linked essays, it argues that the camera has fundamentally changed the human relation to reality: photography aestheticizes what it records, produces a sense of knowledge that substitutes for understanding, and — in its voracious accumulation of images — renders the world "available as a set of potential photographs." The book is the starting point for nearly every subsequent discussion of photography and ethics, and its arguments about image saturation and spectacle anticipated the digital-image world of the twenty-first century. Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), her last major essay, returned to the question twenty-five years later, partly as a self-correction: she now argued that images of suffering can produce moral response, that the accusation of "compassion fatigue" is sometimes itself a form of cynicism.
Illness as Metaphor (1978), written while Sontag was being treated for breast cancer, argued that the metaphors a culture attaches to disease — cancer as invasion, TB as romantic wasting — add a layer of punishment to the already punishing experience of being sick. AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) extended the argument. Both are short, fierce, and widely assigned in medical humanities.
Sontag published four novels, of which The Volcano Lover (1992) is the most read; directed four films; kept a journal published posthumously as Reborn (2008) and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh (2012); and was, from the 1960s to her death, the closest thing American intellectual life had to a European-style public intellectual — a role she inhabited with self-consciousness and occasional grandiosity. Her post-9/11 New Yorker essay, which argued that the attacks were a consequence of American foreign policy, produced the most intense controversy of her public life. She died of leukemia in 2004.
Sontag earns her place because her central essays — on photography, illness, spectacle, suffering, and interpretation — are the points at which aesthetics and ethics meet in American nonfiction of the second half of the twentieth century. On Photography is as indispensable to the graph's photography/politics axis as Lange's or Parks's images.