On Photography

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Jacket price clipped and with some light wear, but generally near fine with a previous owner's inkstamp on front free endpaper. 8vo. 207 pages. Original grey cloth, white lettering on spine; pictorial dust jacket designed by Jacqueline Schuman. First edition, first printing of Sontag's landmark investigation of the nature and role of photography, oft reprinted but here in its original edition just as it first made waves in the photo world. These essays – literary and polemical rather than academic – originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. An important text in the literature of photography.