Susan Sontag passed away and I am feeling very sorry for the delay of our publishing project. I am editing with Kojin Kondo (the Japanese translator of Sontag's On Photography) a volume called Talking to Photography, a collection of essays from a dozen critics on photography's relationship with language. It was to be published early 2004, but one thing led to another and it's not done yet.
For the volume I wrote an essay around the theme of "on Photography 25 years later," and translated Susan Sontag's short but very dense article called "On Photography: A Little Summa." It's such a pity that we couldn't show her the finished volume.
The collection starts by discussing four 20th-century foundational critics on photography: Benjamin, Barthes, Sontag, and Flusser. And it contains long interviews with the two most intelligent photographers working from Japan: Naoya Hatakeyama and Chihiro Minato. We are hoping to publish it by March 2005.
