The Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn has been presenting since 14 March 2025 the author Susan Sontag, who has dedicated her life to the study of visual media.
Abb. oben: Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag © The Peter Hujar Archive / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025.
Throughout her life, the author, critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag has worked intensively with visual media. Coming from a background in philosophy and literary studies, she clearly recognised the decisive influence of photography in our media-driven society. As an attractive woman herself, she was a sought-after subject for photographers and utilised the power of the medium for her own agenda. She described her early encounter with images of the Holocaust as a ‘negative epiphany’ in her life and the starting point for her further involvement with photography. She wrote in her first novel The Benefactor in 1963 that film was life, photography a memento mori. As a passionate cineaste, Sontag saw film as the ‘most vivid, most exciting and most important of all art genres.’ As a school of sensibility, cinema not only shows you ‘how to pose, smoke, kiss or fight’, but also offers the opportunity to work through grief. As a director, Sontag has made four films, exploring the boundaries of visualisation and voyeurism in practice.
The exhibition Susan Sontag. Seeing and Being Seen focuses on her reflections on photography and traces Sontag’s theories and thoughts on the subject. Her preoccupation with queer culture, discrimination against people with HIV and her own cancer are also mentioned. Sontag is also shown in her role as a film enthusiast and director, not least to portray her as an independent woman who rebelled against society throughout her life
In her programmatic essay One Culture and the New Sensibility (1965), Sontag called for the abolition of the distinction between high and popular culture and propagated a new way of perceiving and experiencing things. Her self-empowerment as an author and intellectual also included an examination of feminism and the question of what it means to be a woman in today’s society. Like her role models Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, Sontag emphasised equal recognition as a thinker. She deliberately did not make her bisexuality public in order to avoid being labelled. Her own cancer and the AIDS crisis sharpened her awareness of discrimination and blame with the help of metaphors. She also explored the enlightening effect of photography together with her partner Annie Leibovitz, with whom she travelled extensively and also documented her own illness. As an activist, Sontag travelled to numerous crisis regions to help make political conflicts more visible. ‘Ethics and aesthetics are one,’ she noted, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, meaning that we cannot separate the two: Looking at photographs – like looking at the world – requires us to receive content and form without prejudice. But we must not stop at mere perception. For Sontag, seeing and being seen are always active processes of being involved.
SUSAN SONTAG. SEEING AND BEING SEEN
The author, critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag (1933-2004) worked intensively with visual media throughout her life and recognised early on the decisive influence of photography on our media-driven society. Her own attitude was ambivalent: on the one hand, she collected celebrity portraits and confessed to being ‘obsessed’ with photos. On the other hand, she criticised photography as an aggressive act that makes the world available to us and at the same time keeps us at a distance.
In her essays, Sontag repeatedly explored the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, empathy and commitment. Her experiences of illness, her involvement in the peace movement and her travels to various crisis areas had a significant influence on her thinking. For Sontag, ‘paying attention to the world’ is the prerequisite for recognising oneself and the world.
As a passionate cineaste, she saw cinema as a school of sensibility that not only provides great pleasure but also acts as a moral model. As a film director, she moved behind the camera and tried out forms of visual essayism. Sontag saw her entire life as an experiment, and throughout her life she worked on shaping herself. She tried out a new way of perceiving things and no longer wanted to differentiate between high and popular culture.
More than 20 years have passed since Sontag’s death. Photographs and films are now more ubiquitous than ever, and image production has increased immeasurably worldwide. The questions that Sontag raised remain relevant: What do we do with images and what do images do with us? For Sontag, seeing and being seen are always active processes of being involved.
OBJECT OF THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
Susan Sontag was a sought-after subject for photographers. She had herself photographed by prominent photographers to market her books and used the power of the medium for her own agenda. The biggest critic of photography was therefore also its biggest profiteer, it was said. In fact, the portraits of Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe as well as the personal photographs of her partner Annie Leibovitz established Sontag’s reputation as the ‘Dark Lady of the Intellectuals’. With masculine outfits and her dark, unruly hair – streaked with a single white strand in old age – Sontag invented her ‘signature look’. As a clever, glamorous and contemporary thinker, she also defined her status through her appearance.
A NEW WAY OF EXPERIENCING THINGS
The 1960s were a time of upheaval and revolt. Susan Sontag moved in the circles of the artistic avant-garde and was close friends with the painter Paul Thek, the photographer Peter Hujar and the artist Jasper Johns. With her collection of essays Against Interpretation (Kunst und Antikunst, 1966), she provided a guide to current art movements such as the Nouvelle Vague and the Happening. Sontag criticised the intellectual approaches to interpretation of her time and pleaded for an unbiased sensual perception of works of art. At the same time, she explored the relationship between high and popular culture in a new way. Her postulate that the feeling triggered by a painting by Robert Rauschenberg could be compared to that evoked by a song by the Supremes triggered a wave of outrage.
NOTES ON ‘CAMP
In her Notes on ‘Camp’ (1964), Susan Sontag focussed on the supposedly superficial aspects of the queer underground. Instead of definitions, she presented 58 theses on various forms of camp expression. The ballet Swan Lake, for example, is just as ‘campy’ as a Tiffany lamp. Sontag wrote: ‘Camp sees everything in inverted commas: not a woman, but a “woman”.’ Excessiveness and artificiality were central characteristics of Camp’s taste. Sontag’s concept found its first practical application in the trial surrounding the film Flaming Creatures (1963) by Jack Smith, which had been confiscated for obscenity. In her expert opinion, Sontag characterised the film as a sensual and poetic shock film, thereby consolidating her status as an unconventional film critic.
BEING A WOMAN
Susan Sontag’s self-empowerment as a critical author and intellectual also included her examination of feminism and her role as a woman. Like Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, she demanded equal recognition as a thinker without also being categorised as ‘female’. In the 1970s, she criticised the unequal treatment of the sexes in several essays. Men were ‘seen’, while women were ‘observed’. While men supposedly gained in competence with age, women lost in beauty. Sontag propagated an androgynous ideal of beauty that unites masculinity and femininity. Together with her partner, the photographer Annie Leibovitz, she realised the book Women (1999), which celebrates the diversity of women of different age groups, cultures and professions.
HEALTH AND DISEASE
When Susan Sontag was diagnosed with breast cancer in the mid-1970s, it changed her life forever. Two and a half years of serious operations and chemotherapy followed. Meanwhile, in Illness as Metaphor (1978), she analysed the stigmatization to which people with the disease are exposed. In the 1980s, when many of her friends were dying of HIV, she extended this research to AIDS. How can you give sick people more visibility without victimizing them? Annie Leibovitz achieved this with a photo of a friend suffering from AIDS and her campaign portraits for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF). When Sontag fell ill with cancer again in 1999, Leibovitz documented the course of her illness and captured how her partner regained her sovereignty.
LIFE AS EXPERIMENT
Susan Sontag saw her life as an experiment. In her diary, she wrote down lists of everything she wanted to change about herself. She constantly reinvented herself, whether as a critic or film director, as a writer or public intellectual. She saw herself as a “project” and worked on her further development throughout her life. Self-reflection and self-criticism were indispensable for this, as were courage and the willingness to make a new start.
ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY
In her book On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag elaborated on the various functions of photographs, which are still valid today: They store memories and serve to authenticate them, but they can also overwrite personal memories. Photography is always associated with power relations, and the images determine how something should be viewed. Photographs teach us a grammar of seeing that is usually accompanied by a judgment. And they suggest an availability of the world, while in reality they create distance and prevent real experience. Photos tend to aestheticize their subject and lead to a blunting of the suffering they depict.
At the beginning of the Iraq war, Sontag deepened her analysis of war photographs in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). She investigated whether such images are arousing or paralyzing and whether they can promote understanding of the world. She also dealt with atrocity photography and explained techniques of image manipulation. Finally, she emphasized the need to be “haunted” by photographs in order not to forget what people can do to each other.
THE RIEFENSTAHL CASE
Leni Riefenstahl made several propaganda films during the Nazi era that are still the subject of controversy. In the 1960s, Susan Sontag described the films Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) as “masterpieces” which, although essentially propagandistic, were very remarkable from a formal point of view. Ten years later, she revised this opinion on the occasion of the publication of Riefenstahl’s Nuba picture book. In her essay Fascinating Fascism (1975), Sontag now emphasized the constants in Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics: pain, submission and obedience were primarily glorified. Sontag’s essay made Riefenstahl’s comeback in the USA considerably more difficult. In her memoirs, Riefenstahl dealt with Sontag’s criticism.
CINEMA AS A SCHOOL OF PERCEPTION
Susan Sontag was a passionate cinephile who often went to the movies several times a day. “Film is currently the liveliest, most exciting and most important of all artistic genres,” she wrote in the 1960s.
In her diary, she recorded which films she had seen, which she still wanted to see and which films were a must-see. Sontag loved European independent film, but was also familiar with silent film classics, Russian and Asian cinema and American experimental film. With her essays, she established herself as a film expert at a time when film and cultural studies were just emerging.
At the end of the 1960s, Sontag was invited to make two feature films in Sweden. The critic thus moved behind the camera. She experimented with the portrayal of deafness and blindness, practiced working in a team and learned how to work with rhythm and montage. She shot her documentaries in essayistic form, with a subjective narrative perspective and the experimental use of tones and sounds. According to Sontag, cinema enables real experiences and thus also offers the opportunity to work through grief.
WITH SONTAG AT THE CINEMA
For Susan Sontag, the cinema was a social space that not only shows visitors “how to pose, smoke, kiss or fight”, but also contributes to a better understanding of the world. At the same time, the cinema is a place of desire: you let yourself be overwhelmed by the images, flirt with the people sitting next to you and fall in love with the actors on the screen. Sontag’s film analyses were diverse: in The Imagination of Disaster (1965), she examined science fiction B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s and recognized the collective fear of nuclear war in their horror scenarios. She described films by Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman in terms of how they expanded the language of film. And in Hollywood films with Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, Sontag identified elements of camp.
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Friday, 14th March – Sunday, 28th September 2025
Monday closed
Tuesday, 10 am to 6 pm
Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Thursday to Sunday and public holidays*
10 a.m. to 6 p.m., *also on Mondays
WHERE?
Bundeskunsthalle
Helmut-Kohl-Allee 4
53113 Bonn
