As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists "make" drawings and paintings while… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Image of an image of an image... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like… — 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
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available… — 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
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to… — 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
Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology… — 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
