Dark Angels Note 174
Dearest Friends
Welcome back to our Friday Note – our weekly collection of writerly thoughts.
Observing
This week in 1933 Susan Sontag was born (16 January 1933 – 28 December 2004).Dubbed the “Dark Lady of American letters”, Sontag was a writer and cultural critic well known for her essays.
Her body of work includes seven non-fiction books, six fiction, and two film scripts. Her last book, At the Same Time, collects 16 essays wrote in the years before she died and was published posthumously in 2007.
During her life she received many honours and prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography in 1978 and was the president of international writers’ organisation, PEN America, between 1987-1989.
Reading
According to this blog on the New York Public Library’s website, Susan Sontag was one of the “smartest voices in American letters”.
The range of topics that she covered, and her inimitable intellect might make her work unapproachable to those unfamiliar with it. That same blog article provides an entry point by signposting you to five books.
Read: Where to Start with Susan Sontag.
Writing
In her essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag wrote “to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.”
Look back through your camera roll and choose a photo that you took. What else was going on in that place, at that moment? Why did you choose to capture that image, what did you exclude and what is unseen in the frame?