Notes on "Camp"  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Notes On "Camp" [1] is a well-known essay by Susan Sontag organized around fifty-eight numbered theses. It was published in 1964 and was the author's first contribution to the Partisan Review. The essay created a literary sensation and brought Sontag her first brush with intellectual notoriety. It was published in 1966 in book form in Sontag's debut collection of essays, Against Interpretation (ISBN 0-87052-352-X).

The essay codified and mainstreamed the cultural connotations of the word camp, and identified camp's evolution as a distinct aesthetic phenomenon. While camp, then as now, is often associated with gay culture, only three of Sontag's fifty-eight theses specifically mentioned homosexuality.

Cultural historians credit Sontag's essay for providing a groundwork for the popular understanding and reception of Pop Art in the 1960s, notably the work of Andy Warhol.