Who is Susan Sontag from On Photography and what is their importance?

Susan Sontag (1933-2004), born Susan Rosenblatt, was an American essaying, novelist, filmmaker, and the author of the monograph On Photography. Throughout the text she provides very little biographical information other than remembering a few topical anecdotes about interacting with photographs at various life stages. For example, one of her earliest defining moments was looking through a photographic book of Holocaust survivors as a young girl of twelve—Sontag states the event left her indelibly marked and no longer innocent. This contrasts with her later textual statements that no one has every discovered ugliness or morality through photographs. The rear cover of the text indicates Sontag wrote four novels and several collections of essays, and won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction. Sontag's books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. In 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.