Essays on Susan Sontag

Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 science fiction film Under the Skin is a supremely stylized, innately profound work that utilizes kaleidoscopic visuals and an unsettling performance from Scarlett Johannson to explore issues of the male gaze and take them to their furthest conclusion. Telling the story of an alien (Johansson) who comes to Earth and entices men with sex for her own twisted, mysterious purposes, Under the Skin charts the progression of a woman’s experience by simultaneously giving her a power and a predatory agency that women are not typically afforded, then stripping that agency away bit by bit ...

ABSTRACT

Susan Sontag’s short story “The Way We Live Now,” first released in The New Yorker in 1986, told a harrowing but heartfelt story at the center of the AIDS crisis, charting the trajectories of the friends of a man who may or may not be dying from AIDS himself. In the process, Sontag’s treatment of time, space and narrative is extraordinarily fluid, utilizing point of view and dialogue in incredibly poignant ways to inject a sense of understanding and empathy towards alternative sexuality at a time in American history when homosexuality and AIDS was being treated as ...

Photography and death:

Introduction: Death in photography has always been a controversial subject and this continues to elucidate comments especially when considering the ethical implications of photography itself. Nostalgia is also an important element of photography and this has been revealed in several artist’s work most notably those like Sally Mann and Luc Delahaye who have both treated the subject of death with some detail especially in their portrayal of dead and decomposing bodies. When one writes about death in photography, we also have to deal with the ‘death of the subject’. After we press the shutter the subject 'dies' at ...