Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash…

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

— Susan Sontag

I photographed with film for many years; now that I work in digital, the difference is enormous. The quality is unbelievable: I don't use…

— Sebastiao Salgado

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

— Susan Sontag

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning…

— Susan Sontag

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt…

— Susan Sontag

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of…

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.

— Susan Sontag

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

— Susan Sontag

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

— Susan Sontag

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar…

— Susan Sontag

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

— 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, all photographs…

— Susan Sontag

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

— Susan Sontag