.
A curious word, wanderlust. I’m ready to go.I’ve already gone. Regretfully, exultantly. A prouder lyricism. It’s not Paradise that’s lost.
Advice. Move along, let’s get cracking, don’t hold me down, he travels fastest who travels alone. Let’s get the show on the road. Get up, slugabed. I’m clearing out of here. Get your ass in gear. Sleep faster, we need the pillow.
She’s racing, he’s stalling.
If I go this fast, I won’t see anything. If I slow down —
Everything. — then I won’t have seen everything before it disappears.
Everywhere. I’ve been everywhere. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
Land’s end. But there’s water, O my heart. And salt on my tongue.
The end of the world. This is not the end of the world.
Susan Sontag, “Unguided Tour”, The New Yorker (October 31st, 1977)
The kind of thinker who made people uncomfortable and didn’t give a shit about it.
Against Interpretation, 1966. Changed how people thought about art and criticism. Stop trying to decode everything, stop looking for hidden meanings. Experience art. Feel it. The essay was a grenade thrown into the academic establishment.
On Photography, 1977. Examined how cameras changed how we see, how we remember, how we consume suffering. Photography as voyeurism. Images as replacement for experience. Prescient as hell, wrote it before Instagram, before phones with cameras, before everyone became a photographer.
Illness as Metaphor, 1978. She’d just survived cancer. Wrote about how we talk about disease, the military metaphors, the moral judgments, the way we blame sick people for being sick. Stripped it all away. Said it plainly: illness is illness. Not a punishment. Not a metaphor. Just a thing that happens to bodies.
Public intellectual when that actually meant something. Spoke out against the Vietnam War. Against Serbian aggression in Bosnia… went to Sarajevo during the siege in 1993, directed Waiting for Godot while the city was under bombardment. That’s commitment.
Post-9/11, she wrote that America’s response was essentially “a self-righteous drivel and outright deception.” Got crucified for it. Didn’t back down.
Uncompromising. Difficult. Brilliant. Lived with photographer Annie Leibovitz for years, they were private about it, which was their business. Buried at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, not New York. Wanted to be here, with the writers and artists and thinkers.
Sontag demanded honesty. From art, from politics, from herself. Made enemies doing it. Didn’t care.
That’s integrity.
Shot on infrared film in Cimetière du Montparnasse. Signed Limited Edition 17” x11” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.