On Photography
1977 · 224 pages
Taking a picture is a form of acquisition, close to aggression, Sontag argues, and a world drowning in images loses the power to feel them. You will not photograph casually again.
★ 7.1
The Books canon
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Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Camera Lucida
1980 · 119 pages
Grieving his mother, Barthes asks what a photograph is and answers with the punctum, the detail that wounds you. Photography criticism has argued in the vocabulary he invented here ever since.
★ 6.5
The Mind's Eye
1999 · 109 pages
The camera is a sketchbook, Cartier-Bresson insists, an instrument of intuition and not of art. These short essays hand you the working method that made modern photojournalism look the way it does.
★ 5.5