Quick Take
- Narration: Jennifer Van Dyck delivers Sontag’s demanding prose with measured intelligence, her pacing respects the density of the text without becoming academic.
- Themes: image and power, photography as cultural force, the ethics of representation
- Mood: Intellectually bracing and occasionally unsettling
- Verdict: For listeners willing to wrestle with ideas, Sontag’s six essays reward the effort, though this is philosophy dressed as criticism, not leisurely cultural commentary.
I came back to Susan Sontag’s On Photography on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, notebook open beside me, half-expecting to coast through it. I had read the print edition years ago, during my graduate work in editorial communication, and remembered it as challenging but navigable. What I had forgotten was how thoroughly it destabilizes you. By the end of the first essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” I had paused the audio three times to sit with a single idea. This is not a book that moves. It interrogates.
Originally published in 1973, the collection arrives in audiobook form with Jennifer Van Dyck as narrator, and the pairing is genuinely well-considered. Van Dyck has the kind of clear, unhurried delivery that suits critical prose: she does not perform the text, she reads it, which is exactly what Sontag’s writing demands. There are no cheap emotional hooks here to lean into, no drama to exploit. Just ideas, stacked with architectural precision.
The Weight of “In Plato’s Cave”
The opening essay remains one of the most demanding pieces of cultural criticism I know. Sontag’s argument that photography has changed our relationship to reality itself, inserting images between us and experience, sounds almost commonplace now in the age of social media. But reading it in context, you realize she was building a framework that the digital world would eventually validate beyond anything she could have anticipated. One reviewer described the text as “exceptionally dense,” and that is accurate without being a complaint. Van Dyck’s narration handles this density by trusting the listener. There are no unnecessary pauses for effect, no vocal signposting of the important bits. You are expected to keep up.
The concept Sontag develops around “transparency”, the idea that when anything can be photographed, the boundaries of art dissolve and a viewer approaches any image without expectations of fixed meaning, is the kind of argument that sounds liberating until you sit with its implications. It is not liberating at all. It is, Sontag suggests, a kind of ethical collapse.
Six Essays, One Sustained Argument
What makes this collection work as an audiobook is that the six essays are not disconnected pieces but chapters in a single sustained inquiry. Sontag circles around photography’s relationship to death, to time, to political power, to tourism, and to the very nature of knowledge. The essay on photography and death is the one I find most affecting on re-listen. She argues that every photograph is a memento mori in the most literal sense, a frozen instant that announces, quietly, that the moment is already gone and the people in it are already on their way to disappearing. Hearing those ideas rather than reading them gives them a different kind of weight. Van Dyck’s voice carrying those sentences makes the melancholy of the argument more present.
The essay on the politics of photography, particularly around war imagery, anticipates debates that would only intensify in the decades after her death. Sontag herself returned to this territory in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), and listening to the earlier work you can hear the seeds of that later, more anguished inquiry. If you have read both, this audiobook becomes a kind of archaeological experience.
Where the Audiobook Format Serves and Where It Strains
One reviewer described the text as reading like an existential crisis in progress, and that person was not wrong, though they may have intended it more as complaint than praise. Critical prose at this level of abstraction can be genuinely difficult to follow aurally when you cannot flip back a page. I found myself rewinding more often here than with almost any other audiobook I have reviewed this year. That is not a mark against Van Dyck’s narration; it is simply the nature of the material. Sontag builds on her own arguments with the assumption that you are holding the earlier ones intact.
For listeners whose photographic experience is primarily digital, one reviewer noted that some of Sontag’s references to snapshot prints in photo albums felt dated. That is fair, but it is also where the audiobook format helps: at a remove from the original text, you can translate her arguments about the snapshot into their contemporary equivalents with relative ease. Replace the photo album with Instagram and most of her observations land harder, not softer.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen to this if you engage seriously with photography as practice, cultural artifact, or philosophy. Listen if you have already read Sontag in print and want a new encounter with the work. Listen if you are interested in how critical thinking sounded before it was expected to be immediately accessible.
Skip this if you are looking for instruction, inspiration, or any form of practical guidance. One reviewer suggested it belongs to every photographer’s library, and in print that may be true, but as an audiobook, it belongs to the listener who is comfortable with difficulty and unafraid of rewinding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Jennifer Van Dyck’s narration appropriate for Sontag’s critical prose style?
Yes. Van Dyck reads the text with quiet intelligence rather than performing it, which is the right approach for Sontag’s densely argued essays. The delivery is measured and clear without being dry.
Do the six essays work as standalone pieces, or do they need to be heard in sequence?
They work best in sequence. Sontag builds her arguments across the collection, and the later essays assume familiarity with her earlier positions. Listening out of order would make the logic harder to follow.
Is the content dated given how much photography has changed since 1973?
Less than you might expect. While some references to analog photography and photo albums belong to their era, Sontag’s core arguments about images, power, and representation have only become more relevant in the digital age.
How does this compare to Sontag’s later work on photography, Regarding the Pain of Others?
On Photography lays the philosophical groundwork that Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) builds on, particularly around war imagery and the ethics of spectatorship. Listening to both in sequence is worthwhile if you want to trace her thinking over three decades.
