On Photography won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for 1977 and was selected among the top 20 books of 1977 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. In 1977, William H. Gass, writing in The New York Times, said the book "shall surely stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon the subject" of photography.[3]
In a 1998 appraisal of the work, Michael Starenko, wrote in the magazine Afterimage: "On Photography has become so deeply absorbed into this discourse that Sontag's claims about photography, as well as her mode of argument, have become part of the rhetorical 'tool kit' that photography theorists and critics carry around in their heads".[4] He added that "no other photography book, not even The Family of Man (1955), which sold four million copies before finally going out of print in 1978, received a wider range of press coverage than On Photography."[5]
In 2003, Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others, which reassesses some of the views she espoused in On Photography. Sontag considered that book to be a sequel to On Photography.[6] Sontag's publishing history includes a similar sequence with regard to her 1978 book Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors a decade later, which expands on some of the ideas contained in the earlier work.
