On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag

A major force in New York intellectual life for over forty years, the novelist, essayist, and critic Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was renowned for her brilliant and impassioned writing on photography. This exhibition of some forty photographs drawn from the Metropolitan's collection pays tribute to Sontag's extraordinary contribution to the history of the medium. Nearly all the text in the exhibition is drawn from Sontag's own vividly aphoristic prose. In some cases, the photographs relate directly to her discussions of individual works or photographers, among them August Sander, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, and Robert Mapplethorpe. In other cases, small groupings of photographs provide a visual complement to broader insights and ideas about the medium and the ways in which it has shaped our world.