Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
“Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
