> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.grainpress.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"
- URL: https://www.grainpress.com/susan-sontag-against-interpretation/
- Published: 2026-10-28T23:36:30.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-28T23:36:30.000Z
- Description: Sontag's 1964 case for describing a work of art before deciding what it means, in a PDF of the complete essay.
- Author: Grainpress Editors
- Tags: HAVE A LOOK, Ways of Seeing, #fmt-brief

"Against Interpretation" is Susan Sontag's essay arguing that criticism has become a habit of translating art into hidden meanings, and that it should attend instead to how a work looks, sounds, and is made. It first appeared in *Evergreen Review* in December 1964 and became the title essay of her collection *Against Interpretation and Other Essays* in 1966\. [Read the full essay here](https://employees.csbsju.edu/dbeach/beautytruth/Sontag-Against%20Interpretation.pdf?ref=grainpress.com), a PDF hosted on a faculty page at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University.

It runs in ten short numbered sections, under epigraphs from Willem de Kooning and Oscar Wilde: "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances." Sontag traces interpretation from the Stoics, who allegorized away the misconduct of Homer's gods, to Marx and Freud, and calls it "the revenge of the intellect upon art." Her examples come from fiction, theater, and film: Kafka, Beckett, Elia Kazan's notes on *A Streetcar Named Desire*, the tank in Ingmar Bergman's *The Silence*. Photography is not among them. The last section is a single sentence asking for "an erotics of art."

Garry Winogrand took up the essay's idea of transparence. In a 1977 seminar at Rice University, [recorded on video](https://www.grainpress.com/garry-winogrand-at-rice-university/), he calls Walker Evans "probably the most transparent" photographer, the quality Sontag names in her ninth section. Together with T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, it was required reading for the students of Winogrand's photography classes.

Sontag's essay also speaks of "the thing in itself," which has an affinity with "The Thing Itself," the first section of John Szarkowski's *The Photographer's Eye*. Szarkowski used that heading for his Museum of Modern Art exhibition in May 1964, seven months before the essay appeared. Together these ideas were influential on the photography of the 1960's.