Her writing has been called grave and sensual, complex and contradictory, incendiary and hotheaded. Susan Sontag, whatever you may believe her writings to be, first and foremost, is a writer embodying the ideal of the modern public intellectual. Since her death in 2004, Sontag's voice has been anything but silent. Sontag's partner, Annie Leibovitz, published her "Photographer's Life: 1990-2005", which chronicles the many private and painful moments of the author's last years of life. Now Sontag's editors have compiled a new book of essays and speeches celebrating her clearheaded and often radical perspective on American culture. "At the Same Time" is a collection of 16 works highlighting Sontag's last years of writing.
When writing about the culture of photography and images, Sontag's criticism was often preceived as controversial. In a review of the book, Regina Marler of the New York Observer does a beautiful job clarifying what Sontag has always done so well in her writing.
Marler observes:
"...in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) and in “Regarding the Torture of Others” (collected here), she shrugged off some of the famous views she expounded in her great classic, On Photography (1977). Her new collection includes another short essay on the subject, “Photography: A Little Summa,” in which she argues that photography is not seeing but a way of seeing, and that this characteristically modern way of seeing—this fragmenting and framing, this way of accessing realities beyond our own lives—gives “shape and form to our experience” at the same time that it “denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real.”That is why we need writers, whose job is to be aware—and make us aware—of more: the messy, thrilling world beyond the edges of the photograph. Although this book is full of vigorous arguments on various topics, its recurrent themes are the importance of literature (Sontag defines literature as works not just worth reading, but worth rereading, translating, advocating) and the writer’s job. She expects a lot from writers."