Have you ever tried to like something because it was the thing to do?  We all have.  I was told that Susan Sontag was a genius so I picked up her book ON PHOTOGRAPHY.  As I’m trying to read her book I thought that she must not have ever photographed anything.  It was so much garbage I never made it very far.  At the first opportunity I sold it.  

Quotes like this convinced me she was an idiot:

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

Well finally I stumbled upon an old editorial putting into words what I couldn’t about why I hated her book

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3613939/I-wish-I-had-kicked-Susan-Sontag.html

If ever a single person was living proof that intelligence is a meaningless quality without modest common sense, it was Susan Sontag who died last week. The reverential tone of the obituaries served to confirm that self-proclaimed intellectuals, no matter how deluded or preposterous, exert a strange, intimidating power over non-intellectuals – especially if they employ that infuriating literary device, the epigram. 

Beware the epigramista. Beneath the veneer of apparent profundity of the epigram’s internal contradiction, there is usually a deep well of meaninglessness, from which other intellectuals can extract similarly worthless academic baubles. The foremost proponent of the apparently profound but actually worthless epigram was Oscar Wilde – as in “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”