All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable. — 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
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. — 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
Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. — 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can… — 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
Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. — 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
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate… — 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
