On Photography by Susan Sontag
Published 1977 · 224 pages · 53,263 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is On Photography to read?
On Photography scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Sontag writes in elevated literary-critical prose, deploying terms like 'flaneur,' 'quiddity,' 'semblance,' 'liminal,' and 'nominalist' alongside specialized references to art history, philosophy, and critical theory. The text draws on Baudelaire, Benjamin, Feuerbach, Plato, and dozens of photographers by name, demanding familiarity with intellectual tradition. Vocabulary is consistently literary without reaching the extreme obscurity of Gravity's Rainbow or the invented language of Joyce.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Sontag constructs long, subordinated sentences that embed qualifications and counter-arguments within a single period, requiring active parsing. Her syntax is precise rather than labyrinthine — she models Jamesian precision without Jamesian hypotaxis, and her argumentative structure keeps even complex sentences navigable. The essay form imposes more syntactic constraint than the experimental novels at the high end of the scale.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- The book operates almost entirely in philosophical and theoretical register: photography's relationship to truth, power, time, death, the real, morality, and beauty. Individual photographers (Arbus, Evans, Weston, Stieglitz) ground the argument in concrete examples, but these are always in service of abstract claims. This sits closer to Doctor Faustus or Notes from Underground than to a narrative driven by event, and squarely in the range flagged by Gemini's re-scoring request.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Each paragraph introduces multiple distinct claims — aesthetic, historical, sociological, philosophical — often without transition. Sontag covers more than fifty photographers, a dozen philosophers and critics (Benjamin, Plato, Brecht, Feuerbach, Marx, Barthes-adjacent territory), and sweeping cultural history across six tightly packed essays. Readers who miss a sentence lose thread; the book rewards and demands re-reading, placing it between 2666 and Moby-Dick on the density scale.
- Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
- As criticism rather than fiction, Sontag states her arguments directly and rarely hides meaning beneath narrative surface. The reader follows an explicit logical structure — though the structure is essayistic and cumulative rather than linear. Some conclusions require readers to synthesize arguments across chapters, but there is no unreliable narrator, no hidden diegesis, and no ambiguity about what Sontag is arguing.
- Symbolic density: 35 out of 100
- Sontag analyzes symbols in photography (the camera as gun, photographs as memento mori) but the book itself is not symbolically coded. The essay mode explicates rather than embeds — when the camera-as-weapon metaphor appears, Sontag names and unpacks it rather than leaving it for readers to decode. The symbolic layer belongs to the subject matter, not the text's own structure.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Sontag's critical voice is authoritative and largely sincere, though she deploys pointed irony toward her subjects — toward photographers' self-justifications, toward Whitman's excesses, toward the pretensions of 'concerned' photography. The gap between surface statement and authorial intent is modest: Sontag generally means what she says and says what she means, placing her closer to Moby-Dick's Ishmael than to Nabokov's Humbert.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Each essay reaches clear-ish local conclusions, but the book's larger thesis — about the image-world's effect on consciousness and ethics — remains genuinely open. The final essay ends not with a solution but with a diagnosis. Questions about whether photographic seeing has permanently damaged moral perception, whether ethical photography is possible, are left for the reader to carry. This is purposeful ambiguity rather than narrative evasion.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Six discrete essays, each self-contained but building a cumulative argument, followed by 'A Brief Anthology of Quotations' that extends and complicates the preceding analysis. The structure is clear enough to follow without mapping, but the essays are not fully sequential — early arguments are revisited and complicated in later chapters. Simpler than Flights or Infinite Jest but more complex than a standard linear nonfiction arc.
How On Photography is regarded
On Photography holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.