Susan Sontag

Sontag changed how readers look at photographs. On Photography, the essays she published in The New York Review of Books from 1973, asks what happens when we collect images of the world instead of experiencing it, and how a photograph of suffering can move us or numb us; Regarding the Pain of Others, in 2003, revisited and partly revised that argument. Her earlier essays Notes on Camp and Against Interpretation, which asked critics to attend to the sensuous surface of a work before its meaning, are short enough to read in a sitting and still provoke.