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
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. — 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
Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To us, the difference between the # photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the… — 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
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 may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph… — 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
Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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 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
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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
Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for… — 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
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
