Throughout her career, author, critic, and public intellectual Susan Sontag maintained an unwavering focus on visual media. Drawing on philosophy and literary theory, she possessed a remarkable prescience about photography's defining role in our media-saturated world. As an attractive woman who herself became a coveted subject for photographers, Sontag deftly wielded the medium's considerable power to advance her own intellectual agenda.

Running through September 28 at Bonn's Bundeskunsthalle, "Susan Sontag: Seeing and Being Seen" centers on Sontag's groundbreaking ideas about photography, tracing her most influential theories and observations. The exhibition also examines her engagement with queer culture, her advocacy against the discrimination of HIV-positive individuals, and her own battle with cancer. Equally compelling is her portrait as a passionate cinephile and filmmaker—a testament to her lifelong identity as an independent thinker who consistently challenged societal norms.

In her landmark 1965 essay "One Culture and the New Sensibility," Sontag called for dissolving the boundaries between high and popular culture, advocating instead for a radically new mode of perception and experience. Her emergence as a powerful intellectual voice was inseparable from her engagement with feminism and the fundamental question of what it means to be a woman in contemporary society. Following the example of her mentors Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, Sontag demanded recognition as an equal thinker. She strategically kept her bisexuality private, refusing to be confined by labels. Her personal battle with cancer, alongside her witness to the AIDS crisis, deepened her sensitivity to how metaphor becomes a tool of discrimination and blame. Working alongside her partner Annie Leibovitz, she continued investigating photography's capacity to illuminate truth. As an activist, Sontag traveled to conflict zones worldwide, determined to give visibility to political suffering. For Sontag, seeing and being seen were never passive acts—they were forms of conscious engagement and resistance.

www.bundeskunsthalle.de