My edition of Sontag's book is the first paperback edition, published in 1978, and I read at least a couple of the essays when they were first published, a number of years earlier, in the New York Review of Books. Since then I've found numerous occasions to return to the book, finding something worth quoting on almost every page. An in depth examination of photography, however, is well beyond the framework of a Boidem column, and anyway isn't something that I have the qualifications to undertake. That being the case, I'll only note that the preparation of this column offered me the opportunity to take the book down from the shelf, and then to devote much more time than I really had available to me to reading it again.