On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry
29. March 2018
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2018.03.24 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Diarmuid Costello, On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge, 2018, 165 pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780415684491.
Reviewed by Paloma Atencia-Linares, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Diarmuid Costello's new book bears the same title as Susan Sontag's published 40 years ago: On Photography. This is an intentional choice and a justified one, since the book surveys and does justice to a vast tradition and history of intellectual thought on photography from the early days (19th Century) until recent times. This is, in and of itself, a much needed contribution, given that the vast majority of books devoted to the philosophy of photography -- at least in the analytic tradition -- are either collections of essays, or idiosyncratic theories of photography that tend to omit (sometimes for justified reasons) a substantial part of the history of scholarly work on the subject. But, unlike Sontag's book,. . .
News source: Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // News