The writer and critic Susan Sontag appears in seven Screen tests from late 1964. At this time, Sontag was teaching at Columbia University, had finished her first novel, The Benefactor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1963), and had just published her groundbreaking essay, “Notes on ‘Camp'” in the autumn 1964 issue of the Partisan Review. Sontag’s analysis of the underground, proprietarily gay, camp sensibility launched this term into mainstream culture, where it immediately became confused with Pop

— Callie Angell

Susan Sontag, year unknown

Installation view of Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures at The Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Left to right, Screen Test: Susan Sontag (1964), Screen Test: Dennis Hopper (1964), Screen Test: Kathe Dees (1964), Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick (1965), Kiss (1963–64), Screen Test: Lou Reed (1966), Screen Test: Kyoko Kishida (1964), Screen Test: Baby Jane Holzer (1964), and Screen Test: Donyale Luna (1964).

Susan Sontag, Screen Test, 1964

Susan Sontag Screen Test

Susan Sontag, Screen Test, ST321

Like so many of the remarkable souls revealed in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, Susan Sontag’s Screen Test is not today viewable on the open web. I dream of a day when The Museum of Modern Art and the Andy Warhol Museum will share these resources with the human race. For the time being, the best I could find was this documentary clip showing Sontag and Andy at the Factory and getting ready to shoot one of her Screen Tests.

Susan Sontag died in 2004 at the age of 71, which is the age I’d be today, if I had lived.