Photography Quotes by Susan Sontag

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

— Susan Sontag

Photographers are always imposing

— Susan Sontag

To photograph is to confer importance.

— Susan Sontag

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

— Susan Sontag

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

— Susan Sontag

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

— Susan Sontag

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

— Susan Sontag

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

— Susan Sontag

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

— Susan Sontag

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a…

— Susan Sontag

Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.

— Susan Sontag

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

— Susan Sontag

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

— Susan Sontag

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

— Susan Sontag

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

— Susan Sontag

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.”

— Susan Sontag

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph…

— Susan Sontag

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by…

— Susan Sontag

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself…

— Susan Sontag

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs…

— Susan Sontag

Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate…

— Susan Sontag

The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and…

— Susan Sontag

The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty,…

— Susan Sontag

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

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an…

— Susan Sontag

“The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy,…

— Susan Sontag

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph…

— Susan Sontag

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects…

— Susan Sontag

Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of…

— Susan Sontag

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an…

— Susan Sontag

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the…

— Susan Sontag

Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according…

— Susan Sontag

“But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works…

— Susan Sontag

Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the…

— Susan Sontag

“That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical…

— Susan Sontag

“Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and…

— Susan Sontag

But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures

— Susan Sontag

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

— Susan Sontag

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

— Susan Sontag

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

— Susan Sontag