Can You Write A Book On Photography Without Pictures?

Susan Sontag did. She had written a series of essays for the New York Review of Books. The essays received strong reactions from the readers and so she rewrote and collected them together into this book. There is a photo on the dust jacket, but nothing inside. It is all glorious words. So take a look at the cover - that is the only picture. There is a drawing on the back cover. These are thoughtful, almost philosophical essays. Here is a short quote:

Cameras implement the instrumental view of reality by gathering information that enables us to make a more accurate and much quicker response to whatever is going on. The response may of course be either repressive or benevolent: military reconnaissance photographs help snuff out lives, X-rays help save them.

Though these two attitudes, the aesthetic and the instrumental, seem to produce contradictory and even incompatible feelings about people and situations, that is the altogether characteristic contradiction of attitude which members of a society that divorces public from private are expected to share in and live with. And there is perhaps no activity which prepares us so well to live with these contradictory attitudes as does picture-taking, which lends itself so brilliantly to both. On the one hand, cameras arm vision in the service of power—of the state, of industry, of science. On the other hand, cameras make vision expressive in that mythical space known as private life.